Loading…
The Prime Minister will inaugurate Param Pragya, an AI-powered high-performance supercomputing facility established at the Sonipat campus of IIT Delhi, on 8 August 2026.
The facility is expected to strengthen the institute's work in artificial intelligence, data science, advanced computing and interdisciplinary research.
The inauguration takes place at IIT Delhi's 57th Convocation, where over 3,000 graduating students, including 587 PhD scholars, will receive their degrees.
A supercomputer is not one very fast machine but thousands of processors harnessed to work on parts of the same problem at once. Its speed is measured in floating-point operations per second — flops. A gigaflop is a billion operations a second, a teraflop a trillion, and a petaflop a thousand trillion. The jump in those units is the clearest way to see how far Indian computing has travelled: PARAM 8000 in 1991 delivered about one gigaflop, PARAM Shivay in 2019 delivered 833 teraflops, and the systems installed under the National Supercomputing Mission together crossed 40 petaflops by August 2025. An AI-oriented facility of this kind matters because training large models and analysing very large scientific datasets are problems that cannot be run on ordinary institutional servers at all.
Simple Analogy: One clerk can add a column of figures. A supercomputer is ten thousand clerks handed one row each, all reporting back in the same instant.
Build an indigenous supercomputing grid across national academic and R&D institutions and reduce import dependence in high-performance computing
Key: Initiated in April 2015 with an outlay of Rs 4,500 crore; jointly implemented by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology through C-DAC Pune and IISc Bengaluru; envisages a grid of more than 70 HPC facilities, with progressive indigenisation of components such as server boards, cooling and power systems
Establish indigenous supercomputing capability after India was denied access to imported systems
Key: India's first indigenous supercomputer, built by C-DAC in 1991; used 64 processors, delivered about one gigaflop, and was exported to Germany, the United Kingdom and Russia
Deliver the first supercomputer built under the National Supercomputing Mission
Key: Installed at IIT (BHU) Varanasi and inaugurated on 19 February 2019; capacity of 833 teraflops, built at a cost of Rs 32.5 crore
Expand indigenous HPC capacity for scientific research
Key: Three indigenously developed PARAM Rudra supercomputers, built by C-DAC at a cost of about Rs 130 crore, were dedicated to the nation in September 2024 and installed at Pune, Delhi and Kolkata
Host of the Param Pragya facility at its Sonipat campus; established as a College of Engineering in 1961 and formally inaugurated on 17 August 1961, it was declared an Institution of National Importance and renamed IIT Delhi under the Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Act, 1963
India's premier R&D organisation for advanced computing; built PARAM 8000 in 1991 and the later PARAM systems, and is one of the two implementing agencies of the National Supercomputing Mission
The second implementing agency of the National Supercomputing Mission alongside C-DAC
The two departments that jointly implement the National Supercomputing Mission
GS Paper 3 > Science and Technology > Developments and Applications in Computing and AI
General Awareness > Science and Technology Current Affairs
General Awareness > Science and Technology
Supercomputing and the PARAM series recur in Prelims science and technology questions, especially in years when a new system is dedicated
A thousand trillion floating-point operations per second, the unit in which modern supercomputer capacity is measured
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, headquartered in Pune under MeitY, the builder of the PARAM series
The 2015 mission to build an indigenous supercomputing grid of more than 70 facilities, run jointly by MeitY and DST