Param Siddhi: India’s AI supercomputer among world top 500 most power non-distributed computers

November 18, 2020

Param Siddhi is a high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer that was established at C-DAC under the National Supercomputing Mission. It has secured rank 63 in TOP 500 most powerful non-distributed computer system list in the world.

What are the features of Param Siddhi?

Param Siddhi was jointly developed by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Department of Science and Technology. The supercomputer has a speed of 5.267 petaflops. It has now got the recognition of non-distributed super computer systems. Param Siddhi was built on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture networking.

What are petaflops?

It is a unit of computing speed. One petaflop equals to one thousand million million FLoating point Operations (FLOP) per second. In simple words, FLOP is the number of arithmetic operations a machine can do in a second.

What are non-distributed computer systems?

In a non-distributed computer system, all the components are in a single location. In case of Param Siddhi, all of its components are located in Pune. India aims to enable and empower the technology used in creating Param Siddhi across multidisciplinary challenges in agriculture, healthcare, energy, education space, cybersecurity, weather and AI application.

National Supercomputing Mission

India is currently implementing third phase of National Supercomputing Mission. The main aim of the mission is to install 70 supercomputers in the country in three phases. In order to achieve this, the Government of India has allocated Rs 4,500 crores to the mission.

The National Supercomputing Mission was announced in 2015. It will support “Digital India” and “Make in India” initiatives of GoI. Under the mission, the first supercomputer of India was installed in IIT-BHU, Varanasi. It was named “Param Shivay”.