India progressing rapidly towards the goal of indigenously made Supercomputers

Context: National Super Computing Mission (NSM) is boosting high power computing in the country.

• India is fast expanding its supercomputer facilities and developing the capacity to manufacture its own supercomputers in the country.

National Super Computing Mission

• The National Super Computing Mission (NSM) is rapidly boosting high power computing in the country through its various phases to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as also genomics, and drug discovery.
• With the infrastructure planned in NSM Phase-I already installed and much of Phase-II in place, the network of supercomputers through the country will soon reach to around 16 Petaflops (PF).
• Phase-III, to be initiated in January 2021, will take the computing speed to around 45 Petaflops.
• NSM is jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

Supercomputers

• Param Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by Param Shakti and Param Brahma at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune, respectively.
• The three phases will provide access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facilities to around 75 institutions and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through Nation Knowledge Network (NKN) - the backbone for supercomputing systems.
• HPC and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have converged together. A 100 AI PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system is being created and installed in C-DAC, which can handle incredibly large-scale AI workloads increasing the speed of computing-related to AI several times.
• The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 2400 supercomputing manpower and faculties till date.

Indigenous capability

• Powered by the NSM, India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with the industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability to make more and more parts in India.
• Efforts are being made to design and develop parts like server board, interconnect, processor, system software libraries, storage, and HPC-AI converged accelerator domestically.

Rudra

• India has developed an Indigenous server (Rudra), which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs.
• This is the first time that a server system was made in India, along with the full software stack developed by C-DAC.
• Such indigenously designed systems with most parts designed and manufactured in India will be installed at places like IIT-Mumbai, IIT-Chennai, and Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) at Delhi, C-DAC, Pune, which are covered under Phase-III and help move towards supercomputers developed and manufactured totally in India paving the way for self-reliance in the field.

https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1666447