Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar launched the PARAM-ISHAN supercomputing facility at IIT, Guwahati.While some institutions already have supercomputers, the number of such institutes will rise and go up to 60 as the government is focussing on providing advanced infrastructure,

Prof. Gautam Biswas, Director, IIT Guwahati said that Param-Ishan has the power of 250 Teraflops and three hundred tera bites capacity and this will not only augment the research initiatives in the Institute, but also help in creating an ecosystem for attracting right talents to the field of research.

• He also opined that IIT is happy to have partnership with C-DAC on this initiative. Param-Ishan can be used in the application areas like computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, computational electromagnetic, civil engineering structures, nana-block self assemble, optimization etc. North East India receives heavy rainfall during monsoon, which leads to flooding and landslides. PARAM-ISHAN can be used for Weather, climate modeling and seismic data processing.

• Vinay Sheel Oberai, Secretary, Department of Higher Education, Government of India; Prof. Rajat Moona, Director General, C-DAC, Pune; Prof. S.V. Rao, Head, Computer Center, IIT, Guwahati were also present during the occasion.