IIT-Kgp to focus on upskilling of students, staff

IIT Kharagpur (IIT-KGP) will now focus on manpower creation and upskilling of students, faculty, scientists, researchers, scientific users in large scale computing across different science domains. The move aims at bridging the gap between application and development aspects in high performance computing (HPC).

The premier institute has received a project titled 'NSM Nodal Center for training in HPC and AI' from Dept. of Science and Technology, C-DAC under the National Super Computing Mission of Govt. of India, to this effect.

"Recent developments in computational techniques in various domains and science and engineering have been strongly linked with efficient utilization of high-performance computing resources. Therefore, it is essential to impart HPC training to the researchers working in the application domain. On the other hand, it is also important that engineers and developers working on HPC understand the requirement posed by the domain experts. We have already conducted an online training program on the basics of HPC along with other nodal centers of CDAC which attracted around 800 students from diverse backgrounds," said Prof. Somnath Roy, principal investigator of the project at IIT Kharagpur.

In the first phase, the topics, which will be covered include fundamental areas like basics of parallel computing; MPI, OpenMP and CUDA programming, Scientific computing, HPC-AI convergence and application areas like multi-scale modeling, computational biology, computational fluid dynamics and so on.

Interestingly, IIT Kharagpur already hosts a 1.3 Petaflop supercomputer named Paramshakti delivered and commissioned through NSM.

It has also set up the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS) funded by DST to carry out next-generation interdisciplinary research and teaching activities that involve this state-of-the-art HPC platform. Param-vidya, a dedicated computing platform will be made available to IIT Kharagpur under NSM for this training and upskilling purpose.

Further, Rs 55.7 lakh has been approved for a period of two years as initial funding for the project to run the NSM Nodal center and conduct training programs.

"Our supercomputing facility has enabled a large group of computational scientists for performing large-scale computations within and outside the campus while they are away. We have also organised a training session on GPU computing for users within the Institute in collaboration with Nvidia. More such training programs are also in pipeline," said Prof. Pabitra Mitra, Head, CCDS and also principal investigator of the project.