“PARAM Siddhi – AI” developed by C-DAC in collaboration with Atos becomes India’s largest and fastest Supercomputer; Ranks 63 in the world

“PARAM Siddhi – AI” developed by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) and Atos has officially become the largest and fastest Supercomputer in India on 17th November, 2020. The PARAM Siddhi – AI is currently ranked at 63 in the TOP500 ranking in the world. While Atos is a global leader in digital transformation, C-DAC is an organization under MEITY (Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology), Government of India.

Experts from C-DAC and Atos ensured that the system was implemented and operationalized in an optimal timeframe. Named ‘PARAM Siddhi – AI’, the initiative was established with an focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) computing under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), an initiative jointly steered by Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India to strengthen national technological capabilities in High Performance Computing.

The system is based on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture, composed of 42 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, equipped with indigenously developed HPC-AI Engine, HPC-AI Software Frameworks, Cloud Platform by C-DAC that integrates Atos Codex AI Suite to deliver real-time analytics and support Artificial Intelligence (AI) application development. The facility will be a Cloud environment and can be accessed by support researchers, higher education specialists, developers, startups, and other technology innovators in India.

It has a peak performance of 4.6 petaflops sustained and 210 AI petaflops.

Minister of State for Education, Communications, Electronics & IT, Government of India, Sanjay Dhotre tweetet “Proud Moment! @cdacindia’s fastest supercomputer, PARAM SIDDHI-AI, ranks 63 in @top500supercomp global list. This #MadeInIndia product enables many state-of-the-art researches in #AI. Through C-DAC Collaborative Innovation Model, both Academia & Industries are benefitting from it”.

Prof Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science & Technology has said that he truly believes that Param Siddhi-AI will go a long way in empowering our national academic & R&D institutions as well as industries & startups spread over the country networked on national supercomputer grid over National Knowledge Network. “It is a historic first. India has one of the largest supercomputer infrastructures in the world and that is evidenced by the ranking that Param Siddhi-AI has received,” he said.

In October, C-DAC had launched the second phase of the ambitious National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). Launched in 2015 and jointly funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the seven-year mission aims at establishing supercomputer facilities across 70 national research and academic institutions and connecting them onto a National Knowledge Network (NKN).

Speaking about the PARAM Siddhi – AI supercomputer, Dr. Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC said that “The state-of-the-art largest HPC-AI infrastructure of the country PARAM Siddhi – AI, equipped with the latest Next Generation technologies and C-DAC indigenous solutions implemented under National Supercomputing Mission will be dedicated for research to the Academia, Scientific and Research Community, MSMEs, Industry and the Start-ups encompassing all the areas of Artificial Intelligence including Natural Language Processing, Surveillance and Image Processing, Automotive industry, Healthcare, Robotics, Computer Vision, Recommender Systems, Education, Agriculture, Space, Defence and National Security”.

“With C-DAC three decades expertise AI and HPC, it will result in developing innovative indigenous solutions, products and ecosystem creation for the country in line with the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative of the Government of India” he said.

Pierre Barnabé, Senior Executive Vice-President, Head of Big Data & Cybersecurity at Atos said that “We are proud to be working with C-DAC to deliver the largest and fastest HPC-AI infrastructure in India. This powerful machine combined with our experience and AI capabilities, and those of the experts at C-DAC, will give researchers the computing power and AI tools and expertise required to empower new scientific breakthroughs.”