The IIT Delhi supercomputer is all set to get an upgrade that would propel it to the Top 3 of supercomputing facilities in the nation. At present, it is the 6th fastest supercomputer in the country with an estimated speed of 524.4 teraflops. It is the largest High Performance Computing (HPC) system across all IITs and is available to developers, end-users and researchers.
The HP Apollo 6000 computing system was commissioned in 2015, a result of a successful collaboration of IIT Delhi with NVIDIA that saw it being ranked 165 in the TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers in the world. It is also the largest GPU-centric system in India and was only one of the few in the world at the time.
The upgradation would be completed by the end of August 2019. At present, the NVIDIA Tesla powered system has 322 CPU nodes and 161 GPU nodes, to which an additional 144 CPU and 40 GPU nodes would be added. The upgradation would improve CPU compute speed by approximately 70% and GPU compute speed by 30%. The cost of upgradation, which is almost half of the initial build cost, is being financed by the MHRD and through funds obtained from research projects.
It is notable that the HPC centre at IIT Delhi has contributed to finding answers in the fields of Atmospheric Science, Molecular Systems, Biology and Chemical Engineering, resulting in acknowledgements in 135 research publications.