IIT Kharagpur to design Desi Supercomputer

C-DAC already makes the PARAM series of supercomputers for strategic requirements

KOLKATA: IIT Kharagpur is building a supercomputer of a speed of 1.3 Petaflops, all the parts of which will be manufactured indigenously.

A Petaflops is a unit of computing speed equal to 1,000 million million (1015) floating-point operations per second. In three months, the institute will be ready to pull the veil off this genius, promised the computer wizards at the institute.

The supercomputer is being built at the high-performance computing (HPC) facility and data centre ecosystem that has come up at the institute under the National Super Computing Mission, which aims at building the fastest and most powerful computers in the country.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which is an autonomous scientific society of the ministry of electronics and information technology, scouted all the IITs before agreeing to set up the HPC at IIT Kharagpur, where the marvel is being built. An MoU between the institute and C-DAC was signed on March 12 for the project.

The department of science and technology (DST), along with experts from Niti Ayog, DRDO and IISc, will help IIT Kharagpur develop this supercomputer.

As the new computing system would revolutionise output and efficiency in complicated calculations, researches on cryptography, chemistry, molecular dynamics, drug discovery, data sciences would directly benefit, said director of IIT Kharagpur Partha Pratim Chakraborty

“Some other fields that will benefit from the project are healthcare, smart cities, geo-sciences and new materials,” he added.

The computer will be built in three phases and no imported part will be used anywhere. The first phase will involve assembling, the second will focus on assembling and manufacturing and the third phase will perfect the design and manufacturing details with all major parts and accessories to be indigenously designed and manufactured, as is C-DAC’s mandate.

After the new supercomputer is built, the HPC will be continuously building improved versions. Students will also use the facility for academic programmes at the institute, like M.Tech, doctoral programmes as well as micro-specialisations.

Source: http://www.indiandefensenews.in/2019/03/iit-kharagpur-to-design-desi.html

BOSS OS: Government of India to roll Bharat Operating System Solutions to replace Microsoft Windows

After experiencing uncountable attacks on major government websites by Chinese hackers, various liabilities have been revealed of Indian Cyberspace. Taking some vital steps against cyber-attack, Indian Government is all set to launch its own operating system. The new operating system is an updated version of India’s own OS dubbed as ‘Bharat Operating System Solution’ or BOSS.

A senior official of Indian Government told that the new and updated operating system, BOSS OS will replace all other operating systems available in the market and will be made available by this month end.

It is considered that new operating system will be giving tough competition to other operating systems like Microsoft Windows, which is currently dominating Indian operating system market.

The newly and highly improved version of operating system, Bharat Operating System Solution (BOSS) is developed by Pune-based organisation ‘Centre for Development of Advanced Computing’ (C-DAC).

Other organisation like Gujarat Technological University (GTU), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), etc. were also involved in the development of new OS, which can support all major Indian languages.

During its three-month trial, Indians own operating system BOSS has effectively and efficiently defended cyber-attacks from various attackers, which include malicious attacks planted by Indian Army for its testing.

Success in trials makes BOSS fit for the fully secure network, which is demanded by Indian Government for its security and integrity.

The latest version of BOSS, which is soon to be released is code-named ‘Anoop’ and will be the successor to BOSS 5.0 code-named as ‘Anokha’.

The new operating system will be having 3.14 GNOME and desktop environment version 3.4. It will be featuring the latest Kernel 3.16 and will support Intel’s architecture 64-bit/32-bit, 32-bit Intel GPU as well as 3D desktop and many more features.

The latest version of BOSS will be having an on-screen keyboard, which will support all major languages of India. C-DAC has included some other features like Unicode 7, Ocra Screen Reader, E-speak and Magnifier, these additional features are added for visually damaged people so that they can effectively use the system.

Indian Government will be also launching next version of operating system called EduBOSS, which is designed for teachers and students and will be having all essential educational tools and applications required by students of primary, secondary and higher levels.