The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M), will train students in high-performance computing (HPC) soon. The institute has been made the nodal centre for training under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

The centre will train scientists and engineers, and create manpower capable of conducting research in artificial intelligence (AI).

Recently, the institute signed an agreement with the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

Rupesh Nasre, a faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said the aim was to build infrastructure, develop applications, focus on research and create a human resource pool.

“Certain institutes were given different clusters of varied capacity to improve the overall infrastructure within the country. The aim is to train and create a set of personnel, including HPC programmers, users or system administrators, besides developing applications,” he said.

“HPC is not prevalent in India. We need to develop ground up by floating certain curriculum courses as part of B. Tech or even B. Sc. For this, you need basic computing infrastructure, which is a little high-end compared to our laptops and desktops,” he added.

As of now, only the older IITs have high-performing computers. These are a cluster of computers that are inter-connected and allow for several operations to be performed simultaneously.

The recent MoU and the resultant training would provide for HPCs in the newer IITs as well, Mr. Nasre said.

At IIT-M, there are students who have domain knowledge, but do not know how to compute. There are also those who know computing, but don’t have domain knowledge, he said.

The institute has developed a mobile phone application that students can download. There are also YouTube videos from where they can learn HPC, he added.