Kharagpur's Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has received a project to provide training for students, faculty, scientists, researchers in High-Performance Computing (HPC)  and Artificial Intelligence, the institute said in a statement. In order to solve broad issues in science, engineering and industry, HPC refers to the process of aggregating computing resources in a way that provides much higher efficiency than one might get out of a standard desktop computer. It is used in applications such as oil discovery, production of medicines, prediction of weather, and other needs for scientific computing.

The IIT-KGP got the project, "NSM Nodal Center for training in HPC and AI", from the Centre for Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the Research and Development organisation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

The NSM envisages empowering academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high- performance computing facilities. The IIT Kharagpur's project will focus on manpower- creation and upskilling of students, faculty, scientists, researchers, scientific users in large scale computing across different domains, to bridge the gap between application and development aspects in HPC, the statement said.

In the first phase, the topics to be covered are fundamental areas like basics of scientific computing, HPC-AI convergence and application areas such as computational biology and computational fluid dynamics.

"Recent developments in computational techniques in various domains and science and engineering have been strongly linked with efficient utilisation of HPC resources. Therefore, it is essential to impart HPC training to the researchers working in the application domain," said Prof Somnath Roy, principal investigator of the project.

It is also important that engineers and developers working on HPC understand the requirement posed by the domain experts, Mr Roy said.

"We have already conducted an online training programme on the basics of HPC along with other nodal centres of C-DAC which attracted around 800 students from diverse backgrounds," he said.

The institute has set up the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS) funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to carry out next-generation inter-disciplinary research and teaching activities that involve the HPC platform.

The statement said that Param-vidya, a dedicated computing platform, will be made available to IIT Kharagpur under NSM for this training and up-skilling purpose. The institute hosts supercomputer Paramshakti delivered and commissioned through NSM.