India’s Param Siddhi-AI is 63rd among world’s top 500 supercomputers

The AI system will strengthen application development of packages in areas such as advanced materials, computational chemistry and astrophysics, and several packages being developed under the mission on platform for drug design and preventive health care system, flood forecasting package for flood prone metro cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Patna and Guwahati, say a Department of Science and Technology (DST) release,

This will accelerate R&D in  war against Covid-19 through faster simulations, medical imaging, genome sequencing and forecasting and is a boon for Indian masses and for start-ups and MSMEs in particular, the release added.

Besides, it will help application developers in testing of weather forecasting packages by NCMRWF & IITM, geo-exploration packages for oil and gas recovery; packages for aero-design studies; computational physics and mathematical applications and even online courses for education.

The supercomputer with Rpeak of 5.267 Petaflops and 4.6 Petaflops Rmax (Sustained) was conceived by C-DAC and developed jointly with support of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) under NSM.

“It is a historical first. India today has one of the largest supercomputer infrastructures in the world and that is evidenced by the ranking that Param Siddhi-AI has received today,” said secretary DST, Professor Ashutosh Sharma.

“I truly believe that Param Siddhi-AI will go a long way in empowering our national academic and R&D institutions as well as industries and start-ups spread over the country networked on the national supercomputer grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN)”, he added.

Prof Sharma pointed out that with the infusion of Param Siddhi-AI, the scientific and technology community in the country will further be enabled and empowered to solve multidisciplinary grand challenges of healthcare, agriculture, education, energy, cybersecurity, space, AI applications, weather and climate modelling, urban planning to name a few.”

“This is a compelling piece of our journey in “Atmanirbharta” through science technology and innovation,” he stressed.

Param Siddhi Supercomputer is built on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture networking along with C-DAC’s indigenously developed HPC-AI engine and software frameworks. The platform will help deep learning, visual computing, virtual reality, accelerated computing, as well as graphics virtualisation.