MADHAVA HPC : A Technological Milestone for IIT Palakkad !
IIT Palakkad inaugurated Madhava Supercomputing Facility, a state of the art Data Center (DC) housing a High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster — a sophisticated addition to the institute’s technological infrastructure. The facility was formally inaugurated by Prof. A. Seshadri Sekhar, Director of IIT Palakkad, marks a major milestone in the institute’s ongoing commitment to research and innovation.
The DC as well as the HPC cluster was designed in close collaboration with CDAC, Pune. Madhava HPC is designed to power complex, data-intensive explorations in areas such as materials design, drug discovery, protein folding, climate modeling, big data analytics, and the deeper realms of fundamental science and engineering. With 52 CPU nodes, 4 GPU nodes equipped with 8 NVIDIA H100 GPU cards, and 4 high-memory nodes (each offering 1 TiB of memory), the system provides a total of 3,000 CPU cores connected via a 100 Gbps InfiniBand interconnect. The facility is supported by 500 TB of primary storage and 200 TB of backup capacity, enabling researchers to tackle computational challenges at scale.
As a shared computational platform, the cluster is accessible to faculty, scholars, and students from departments such as Physics, Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Civil Engineering, fostering vibrant interdisciplinary collaboration. Hence the DC is built for future expansion, supporting the growing computational needs of the institute and the surrounding research community.
The cluster is named in honour of Madhava of Sangamagrama, the illustrious 14th-century mathematician from Kerala, whose pioneering work on infinite series, including series expansions for trigonometric functions, represents a significant contribution to ideas that are central to calculus and numerical computations.
