India’s newest and fastest supercomputer, PARAM-Siddhi AI, has been ranked 63rd in the Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world. The supercomputer was established earlier this year, under the National Supercomputer Mission (NSM) and is going to be installed in the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing’s (C-DAC) unit. The Top500 project tracks the most powerful supercomputers in the world and is published twice a year.
PARAM-Siddhi is the second Indian supercomputer to be entered in the top 100 on the Top500 list. Pratyush, a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, ranked 78th on the November edition of the list. It was ranked 66th in the June rankings announced by the project.
Another Indian supercomputer, Mihir (146th on the list), clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing power to match PARAM-Siddhi. While the new supercomputer is significantly faster than Pratyush, delivering 6.5 petaflops of power, it is far behind the leaders in the list.
Japanese supercomputer Fugaku (442 petaflops) and IBM’s Summit (148.8 petaflops) are the two most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to the Top500 list. Chinese Sunway TaihuLight is number four on the list (93 petaflops), developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) in China.
The computer is expected to be used as a platform for academia, scientific research, startups and more. Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said the computer has been designed for disaster management, computational fluid dynamics and more. “As we move forward with the National Program on AI, this will prove to be exceptionally useful to research teams across the country, as well as to companies and startups,” he added.
“Our mission is to make India a global destination for AI-based products and advanced research in AI, with emphasis on state-of-the-art solutions in various domains, including robotics,” said Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC. Darbari also said that C-DAC is also creating the peripheral frameworks required for high-performance computing (HPC)-AI, which can be used by startups and researchers in the country.
The supercomputer was commissioned by the C-DAC earlier and has been developed in association with chipmaker Nvidia and French IT consulting firm Atos.
