IIT Madras to Train Students in High Computer Processing and AI

IIT Madras has decided to train students for High computer processing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence(AI). For the same, IIT madras has been declared as the nodal centre under National Supercomputing Mission.

IIT Madras is aiming to create a wide scope for research in the fields of HPC and AI and create manpower that would be helpful in the current and future needs of the country.

As a part of this project, IIT Madras has recently signed an agreement with the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. Other IIT’s that are involved in the training programme as sister nodal centres are IIT Palakkad, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Goa.

For facilitating this training, IIT Madras has developed a phone application and Youtube tutorials. Training is also provided through online courses and workshops that are being conducted by professors from the institute.

IIT Madras: Why train students for HPC?

HPC is a group of computers that are inter-connected and allow several operations to be executed simultaneously. Currently, only the older IIT’s possess these systems.

Initiating the course related to HPC and AI as a part of the curriculum will boost other IIT’s also to use HPC. Through this, the system for HPC will be installed in the newer IITs too.

Officials also recognised that the students possess domain knowledge about HPC. However, most of them are unaware of how to compute in this system.

Thus, IIT Madras has decided to provide various courses to train the students in HPC and AI. Students can access the training through phone apps, youtube or the online courses being provided by the institute.

About the HPC Course:

IIT Madras, the nodal centre along with its three sister nodal centres has provided a 3-month online course named ‘HPC Shiksha: Basics of High-Performance Computing’.

Students can avail this course by paying a fee of Rs. 1000. For other candidates, the fee is Rs. 4000. An examination is conducted at the end of the course after which the students will be awarded a graded certificate and a participation certificate.

During the course, students will be trained with the basics of parallel computing so that the students have a better understanding of the application of HPC and AI.

Remarks from the IIT Madras Officials:

Rupesh Nasre, a faculty from the computer science while mentioning the aims of HPC training said that, “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 also added that “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.”