ICAR-IISR, Indore collaborates in High Performance Computing (HPC) Workshop

14 - 16 July, 2021

A Virtual Workshop on “High Performance Computing (HPC) in the Agriculture Domain” was hosted by the IIT, Indore; ICAR-Indian Institute of Soybean Research, Indore, Madhya Pradesh and Mahindra University, Hyderabad in collaboration with the C-DAC, Pune, Maharashtra; IISC, Bengaluru and IIT, Kharagpur, West Bengal from 14^th July, 2021 to 16^th July, 2021. The Workshop was organized under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) from the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC).

The Chief Guest, Prof. D.B. Phatak, Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT, Indore, Madhya Pradesh outlined the global view on the roles of crop and oil production in increasing the GDP of the country.

The Guest of Honor, Prof. V.K. Tewari, Director, IIT, Kharagpur, West Bengal highlighted the global view about the agricultural domain. Underlining the reasons like land shrinkage due to which the people are not getting attracted towards the domain, he emphasized on the importance of innovations to boost yields.

The Guest of Honor, Prof. Rajat Moona, Director, IIT, Bhilai, Chhattisgarh outlined the importance of high performance computing and its use in agriculture due to the unstable agricultural and weather conditions and limited resources in the country.

The Guest of Honor, Prof. Srikanth Sastry, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru delivered the Talk on the objectives of NSM in the various research domains in the country.

Dr. Anil Rai, ADG (ICT), ICAR briefed about the supercomputing facility - ASOKA at ICAR-IASRI, New Delhi that has been developed for the large scale data storage and analysis for its application in agriculture.

Prof. N.K. Jain, Director, IIT, Indore, Madhya Pradesh deliberated on the usefulness of the HPC in the several domains and adding the agricultural domain to the regular curriculum.

The Special Guest, Dr. Nita Khandekar, Director, ICAR-Indian Institute of Soybean Research, Indore, Madhya Pradesh underlined the various applications of High Performance Computing in agriculture. She highlighted the usefulness of HPC in the various areas like Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System, Precision Agriculture, Decision Support Systems, Information Systems, Data Mining, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics.

Prof. Yajulu Medury, Vice-Chancellor, Mahindra University, Hyderabad; Prof. Narendra S. Chaudhari, IIT, Indore, Madhya Pradesh and Prof. Pabitra Mitra & Prof. Rintu Banerjee, IIT, Kharagpur, West Bengal also marked their presence as the Special Guests of the occasion.

The Workshop was aimed at bringing together the researchers, engineers, industry experts, students and practitioners to apprise them about the latest HPC Technologies developed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) and its application in the area of agricultural domain.

More than 2,000 participants attended the Webshop.

(Source: ICAR-Indian Institute of Soybean Research, Indore, Madhya Pradesh)