Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated ‘Param Pragya’, an AI-enabled high-performance supercomputing facility at IIT Delhi’s Sonipat campus, while addressing the institute’s 57th convocation — a ceremony at which more than 3,000 graduates, including 587 PhD scholars, received their degrees.
The facility is built to carry AI, data science, advanced computing and interdisciplinary research, and it lands inside the National Supercomputing Mission’s wider build-out. The significance is less the machine than the location of the machine: capability of this class sitting on an Indian campus, available to Indian doctoral students, rather than rented by the hour from a data centre abroad.
Param Pragya, the AI-enabled supercomputing facility at IIT Delhi’s Sonipat campus. Photo: to be sourced from the PIB photo gallery for the date of the convocation (GODL-India).
Compute has become infrastructure. A country that rents it will always research at someone else’s priority.
At a Glance
• Facility ‘Param Pragya’ — AI-enabled high-performance computing
• Location IIT Delhi, Sonipat campus, Haryana
• Occasion 57th convocation, IIT Delhi
• Graduating class 3,000+ students, including 587 PhD scholars
• Sits within National Supercomputing Mission
The honours conferred at the same ceremony — the President’s Gold Medal, the Shankar Dayal Sharma Gold Medal, the Director’s Gold Medal and the Perfect Ten Gold Medals — are the visible part of a convocation. The facility switched on beside them is the part that will still be working in ten years.
The question worth returning to is utilisation. A supercomputer earns its cost in queue time booked, papers produced and models trained, not in the ribbon cut. Blitz India will look for the first published allocation figures from the Sonipat facility, and for how much of that capacity reaches research groups outside the host institution.
