This initiative will put India among the top countries in global AI supercomputing research and innovation

PUNE: NVIDIA said on Monday that the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will commission India’s largest HPC-AI supercomputer, ‘PARAM Siddhi – AI’.

This initiative will put India among the top countries in global AI supercomputing research and innovation, it said.

The initiative has been spearheaded by Abhishek Das, Scientist and Program Director (HPC-AI Infrastructure Development) at C-DAC, who conceived the idea and designed the architecture for the largest HPC-AI infrastructure in India.

It was approved by Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union minister of Electronics and IT and Law & Justice; Ajay Prakash Sawhney (Secretary, MeitY), Prof Ashutosh Sharma (Secretary, DST) and recommendation of National Supercomputing Mission (NSM – a government initiative) Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) chaired by Dr V K Saraswat, Member, Niti Aayog.

The supercomputer will have 210 AI Petaflops (6.5 Petaflops Peak DP) and will be based on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture comprising 42 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, connected with NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networking along with indigenously developed HPC-AI engine, Software Frameworks, Cloud Platform by C-DAC.

Dr Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC said that PARAM Siddhi – AI, a large-scale HPC-AI scalable infrastructure will be established under NSM at C-DAC, with support from Niti Aayog, Ministry of Electronics and IT, Department of Science and Technology, and the central government. It will use NVIDIA Next Generation technology, C-DAC software stack and Cloud platform.

“It will play a pivotal role in developing a vibrant ecosystem for research and innovation in science and engineering. With three decades of expertise in AI and augmenting the AI and Language Computing Mission Mode Program of C-DAC, this infrastructure will accelerate experiments and outcomes for India specific grand challenge problems in Health Care, Education, Energy, Cyber Security, Space, Automotive and Agriculture. It will catalyse partnerships with the Academia, Industry, MSMEs and Start-ups,” he said.

“NVIDIA is committed to supporting nations across the globe in their mission to advance the frontiers of AI-enabled research,” said Charlie Boyle, General Manager and Vice-President of DGX systems at NVIDIA. “The turnkey NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture is central to helping C-DAC deploy its supercomputer in record time. With this new AI supercomputer, C-DAC will be able to unleash AI innovation at incredible scale to help India address some of its most important challenges now, and in the future”.