Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is among the first academic institutions to receive a supercomputing facility of 1 Peta-flop computing power under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), a statement said on Wednesday.

The institute is in the process of setting up a new Centre for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS) around the supercomputing platform to build, manage, and operate the high performance computing facility.

This will provide large computational support to the users to carry out both research and teaching activities that involve state-of-the-art high performance computing (HPC).

"Faculty members and their research groups at IIT Kharagpur are engaged in research activities in several areas of national importance that require large computational (both hardware and software) support," said P.P. Chakrabarti, Director, IIT Kharagpur.

A Peta-Flop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

Chakrabarti said: "The 1 Peta-Flop new system with both CPU and CPU-GPU based servers along with the already existing HPC equipment will provide about 1.5 Peta-Flop capacity support to several such areas in which the researchers of IIT Kharagpur are actively engaged."

The facility will cover cutting-edge research in different interdisciplinary areas such as biomolecular simulations, drug design and bioinformatics, climate change and geo-scientific exploration etc.

"Other than research, the centre will also focus on education and capacity building. It will promote high performance computational research excellence in different areas for PhD and post doctoral fellows as well as focused courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels," added Chakraborty.