National Symposium on National Supercomputing Mission (NSM

National Symposium on National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)
Over National Knowledge Network (NKN)
@ Chancery Pavilion Hotel, Residency Road , Bangalore.
Day 1 Updates

National Symposium on NSM over NKN is jointly organized by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) & National Knowledge Network (NKN). The two days event was inaugurated on 9th October 2017, with a wholehearted participation from premier R&D organizations, Industry and Academic Institutes.

Dr. N. Sarat Chandra Babu, Executive Director, C-DAC Bangalore, delivered the welcome address. He highlighted NSM activities and mentioned the groups of NSM namely, R&D, Infrastructure, HRD and Application groups. Under infrastructure, 6 HPC installations will be coming under various places in the country by end of this financial year.  This mission will help the scientists and engineers spread over the country to be able to access HPC resources to carry out their research to solve National level problems.
Shri P. S. Dekhne, Scientific Consultant, Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to Govt. of India, highlighted on the Big Data Analytics with high performance computing. As of now more than 1800 institutes are using the 10GB NKN connectivity, he appealed the participants to provide feedback for the same.

Shri B. Vinaya, State Informatics Officer & Senior Technical Director, NIC Bangalore talked about multi gigabit network connecting all states capital through NKN. He also highlighted the projects from NIC like E-office, E-hospitals, DBT(Direct Benefit Transfer), BhagyaLakshmi, Nadakacheri, Jeevan praman for pensioners and Samrakshane (Crop insurance).

The keynote address was by Shri B.S. Jagadeesh, Outstanding Scientist & Associate Director, E&I Group in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, Mumbai, on Building and Operating State of the art Peta-scale computing systems. He talked about the structure of the petascale system bandwidth, latency, scalability of the infiniband network and storage technology. He elaborated on the methods to extract maximum from a single processor.

The inaugural program also included release of Cloud Vulnerability scanner, a product by C-DAC Bangalore team. Cloud Vulnerability scanner can be used to audit cloud computing infrastructure for identifying security threats and find out ways to mitigate them.

Shri G.L. Gangaprasad, Senior Director, C-DAC Bangalore proposed the vote of thanks.

Three technical sessions were scheduled on day 1.

Session 1 was chaired by Shri Gangaprasad. The first talk by Shri P.S. Dekhne explained about Big Data Sciences for Scientific and Engineering Applications of HPC Domain and their initiatives in projects such as Large Hadron Collider(LHC), Genomics, Astrophysics and Climate sciences.  Dr. Rajendra Joshi talked about Accelerating biology: extreme scale visualization and analysis where he highlighted various collaborative projects on disease studies using genomics, molecular dynamics and Data analytics. Prof.Prabhu Ramachandran, IIT Bombay, gave an overview of Making HPC for numerical methods productive and fun and explained about python based interfaces which they developed for code portability and output reproducibility.

Session 2 was chaired by Dr. Sumit Mookherjee IUAC, Delhi. Shri Bharat Kumar, NVIDIA explained about the Practical reality of Heterogeneous supercomputing and requested user community to give their feedback to incorporate the same in GPU architecture. Shri Ramakishan Malladi, Intel delivered a talk on Importance of software optimization and code modernization to unleash potential of silicon. Dr. Gurunath Gurrala, IISc, highlighted Role of HPC for Power Systems Operation and the approaches to identify blackouts in power grids.

Session 3 was chaired by Dr A.B Saha, former Executive Director, C-DAC Kolkata. Dr MV Hosur, presented Applications of Bigdata technology in Bioscience area. Prof Veni Madavan, IISc, presented, Blockchain Technology:Applications beyond Cryptocurrencies. Dr. Prem Laxman Das, SETS Chennai, Cray delivered a talk on Post-quantum Cryptography.

The event had a participation of around 200 researchers, scientists and academicians from Bhopal, Ahmedabad, Gangtok, Varanasi, Pune, Imphal, Waynad, Pandharpur, Chennai, Tirupati, Bhopal, Mumbai, Delhi, Salem, Suratkal, Warangal, Trivandrum, Guwahati, Surat, Mysore, Guntur, Kolkata, Gandhinagar, Nagpur, Chandhigarh, Durgapur, Coimbatore, Bangalore etc. Day-1 of National Symposium on NSM over NKN concluded successfully with interesting technical demos and closed networking with experts and participants.