National Institute Of Technology Sikkim recently launched the Param Kanchenjunga super computer at the hands of state governor Shrinvas Patil, and it’s touted to be the fastest supercomputer among all the 31 NITs in India. Named after the third-highest mountain in the world, Mt. Kangchenjunga, the supercomputer is the fruit of the collaboration between Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the NIT Sikkim. The total cost estimated to build the supercomputer is around INR three crores.
Sanjay Wandhekar, associate director and head, High Performance Computing, C-DAC, stated that this supercomputer is primarily built to aid in research and academics. There are many research areas in NIT Sikkim, such as climate modelling, where the supercomputer can be of huge help. The Param Kanchenjunga will function at 15 Teraflops.
China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is the world’s fastest at at 33.86 petaFLOPS (PFLOPS), or 33.86 quadrillions of FLOPS. This is a record that this supercomputer has been consecutively holding on for six straight years now. It was developed by National University of Defense Technology, China.