CHENNAI: Boosting India’s push for technological self-reliance in the field of cutting-edge computing, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) launched Param Shakti, a 3.1-petaflop indigenously built supercomputing facility at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) on Thursday.

For the unversed among us, who struggle to comprehend the magnitude of the performance purely by the unfamiliar unit petaflop, try this: The computers that most of us have at home have a computational speed at gigascale levels, which can do a billion calculations per second. Petaflop is one lakh times faster than that, performing 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second (that is 1 followed by 15 zeros), a figure so astronomical it is used only by those dealing with, well, astronomy or computing.

Built entirely in India using the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing’s RUDRA series of servers and powered by open-source software, Param Shakti is among the most powerful computing facilities in Indian academia. The system has been funded under the NSM, jointly steered by MeitY and the Department of Science and Technology.

The facility is designed to support cutting-edge research across aerospace engineering, climate modelling, advanced materials, combustion studies, nuclear sciences, and drug discovery, where large-scale simulations are increasingly replacing time-consuming and costly experimental trials. Operational since May 2025, Param Shakti has already recorded over 80 per cent utilisation, underlining strong demand from the research community.

Addressing students and faculty at the launch, MeitY secretary S Krishnan noted IIT-M’s growing interdisciplinary strength and said the mission was backing application-driven research at a scale that delivers real impact. With 37 supercomputers already deployed nationwide and more in the pipeline, including a flagship system planned for Bengaluru, India’s research ecosystem was being significantly strengthened, he said. Krishnan also highlighted the IndiaAI Mission’s strategy of supporting multiple GPU architectures to avoid technological dependence.