The Param Shakti supercomputing facility, with a peak computing capacity of 3.1 petaFLOPS (floating-point operations per second), has been inaugurated at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras). The facility has been set up under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Param Shakti at IIT Madras is one of the most powerful supercomputing systems deployed at an Indian academic institution. It significantly enhances India's high-performance computing (HPC) capacity and will serve research communities across domains including aerospace engineering, materials science, drug discovery, computational biology, climate modelling, and artificial intelligence.
The National Supercomputing Mission was launched in 2015 with an outlay of ₹4,500 crore to deploy a network of supercomputers across premier Indian academic and research institutions. Param Shakti at IIT Madras joins a growing network of NSM-deployed systems including Param Pravega at IISc Bangalore, Param Ganga at IIT Roorkee, and others.
One petaFLOP equals 10^15 floating-point operations per second. At 3.1 petaFLOPS, Param Shakti is designed to handle computationally intensive simulations and big data workloads that are beyond the capacity of ordinary computing infrastructure. Its deployment at IIT Madras — a premier technical institution with strong research programmes in aerospace, automotive, and materials engineering — will accelerate R&D and industry collaboration.
C-DAC, the implementing agency, is responsible for design, development, and deployment of NSM supercomputers, most of which use indigenously developed RUDRA servers, reflecting progress toward technological self-reliance.