The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has upgraded the PARAM- Nkontabu HPC cluster at the Advanced Information Technology Institute (AITI), also known as the “India-Ghana Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT”. PARAM-Nkontabu, is a hybrid supercomputing cluster with a peak performance of approximately 2 TFlops. Around 50 applications from various scientific domains such as Molecular Dynamics, Quantum Mechanics, Bioinformatics, Climate Modeling, Astrophysics and Computational Fluid Dynamics have already been ported onto the cluster and will prove to be a ground breaking initiative to better research and development prospects for Government of Ghana.

The supercomputing facility constitutes of a state-of-the-art compute infrastructure developed by The system has a low latency high speed ‘PARAMNet III’ primary interconnect. The secondary interconnect utilizes Infiniband for high end storage back-up & archival purposes. The C-DAC HPC Resource Management Engine (CHReME), assists in cluster scheduling and management. This facility shall be remotely supported by C-DAC for a period of 1-year. The Scientist Exchange Program ensures enhancing the skills of porting, parallelizing, and optimization of scientific application codes on a larger scale to scientists at Ghana.

The inauguration ceremony of “PARAM-NKONTABU” HPC facility was held on July 30,2012 at “The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence”, Accra, Ghana by the Honorable Minister for Communication, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu in presence of the Director General of C-DAC  Prof. Rajat Moona,  Hon. Gideon Quarcoo, a member of Court of Governors, Ghana as the Function Chair, Ms. Dorothy Gorden, HoD AITI, Mr. Ajneesh Kumar, Deputy High Commissioner and Counselor of the Embassy of India along with other distinguished dignitaries.

Basic and Advanced level workshops provided to scientists from Ghana were primarily focused to give an insight into the different aspects of HPC with a notion of capability building in the field of Bioinformatics, Seismic, Climatology, Structural Mechanics, Materials Modelling, Fluid Dynamics, Financial Modelling etc. The workshop participants included professors, researchers, application developers from different Institutions, Universities from Ghana.

The Centre of Excellence is a joint initiative between Govt of India and Govt of Ghana with an objective to advance the technical and scientific cooperation between India and Ghana through the scientists exchange programme in the field of HPC, Simulation & Modelling. The project is sponsored by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Government of India through Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India.

Dr. Hemant Darbari, Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune said “The capability building for key way so as to ensure output oriented research in the field of scientific computing”.

Dr. Pradeep K. Sinha, Senior Director-HPC, C-DAC, Pune told “C-DAC is proud to collaborate with Ghana in the area of HPC. This will help both Ghana and India enrich their supercomputing expertise and build a stronger HPC community in the two countries”.

“The decade long association in HPC between Ghana and India shall definitely go a long way in addressing the scientific and research application requirement of the respective countries”, said Shri Goldi Misra, Group Coordinator & Head HPC Solutions Group, which has implemented this project.