Param Siddhi: The SuperComputer of India
By: Ayush Kumar Singh
Tags: Hpc, Distributed Systems, Supercomputer, Param Siddhi, Supercomputing

India is the fastest-growing tech hub in the world recently added another feather in its cap by establishing PARAM SIDDHI Supercomputer which bagged 63rd rank in the list of 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Before we know more about Param Siddhi Supercomputer, let us know a little about Supercomputer, its evolution over the years, and its applications.

What is a Supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. They are large systems that are specifically designed to solve complex scientific and computationally intensive tasks and process them fast. A few of the applications that use supercomputers are quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, and oil & gas exploration. These applications require an amount of computing power and resources that go beyond what is available in general-purpose computers.

Evolution of Supercomputers:

Use and Development of supercomputers date back to 1950 to 1954, i.e. IBM NORC where its development started in the 1950s and was officially handed to the US Navy on 2nd December 1954. Use and Development of supercomputers date back to 1950 i.e IBM NORC. Its development started in the 1950s and was officially handed to the US Navy on 2nd December 1954. However, CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. It was designed by Seymour Cray and ran at about 1 megaflop (a million floating-point operations per second).

How are Supercomputers ranked:

In high-performance computing, Rmax and Rpeak are scores used to rank supercomputers based on their performance using the LINPACK benchmark (The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system’s floating-point computing power).

Rmax — Rmax is determined by the HPL benchmark. Details aren’t always published, but in most cases, the problem dimension requires a decent fraction of total memory. A system’s Rmax score describes its maximal achieved performance.

Rpeak — Rpeak is determined by multiplying the number of floating-point units (usually vector) per processor times processor count times the number of floating-point instructions that can be issued per second. This is a bit hard today because of frequency variation. This score describes its theoretical peak performance.

Values for both scores are usually represented in teraFLOPS or petaFLOPS (A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Additionally, a petaflop can be measured as one thousand teraflops).

A list of a few Supercomputers decade wise:

Param Siddhi :

India will commission Param Siddhi as announced by NVIDIA on Monday, 16th November 2020. Param Siddhi AI bagged 63rd rank in the top 500 non-distributed supercomputers in the world. Established under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at C-DAC. It was conceived by C-DAC and developed jointly with the support of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under NSM

A distributed supercomputer is a supercomputer with processors spread around the world, connected via the internet. It’s conceptually the same as a classic supercomputer but distributed.

In a non-distributed system, all the parts of the system are in the same physical location. In a distributed system, parts of the system exist in multiple locations.

Key Points:

Param Siddhi is a High-Performance Computing-Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer developed by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

It was commissioned by the C-DAC earlier and has been developed in association with chipmaker Nvidia and French IT consulting firm Atos.

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.

The supercomputer (Param Siddhi) has a Rpeak of 5.267 Petaflops and 4.6 Petaflops Rmax.

Param Siddhi-AI will help deep learning, visual computing, virtual reality, accelerated computing, as well as graphics virtualization. The computer is expected to be used as a platform for academia, scientific research, startups, and more.

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’s specific grand challenge problems in Health Care, Education, Energy, Cyber Security, Space, Automotive, and Agriculture.

The AI system will strengthen application development of packages in areas such as advanced materials, computational chemistry & astrophysics, and several packages being developed under the mission on the platform for drug design and preventive health care system, flood forecasting package for flood-prone metro cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Patna, and Guwahati.

This will accelerate R&D in the 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.

Indian Supercomputers:

The first computer to make a place in the world’s top 500 supercomputers from India was Pratyush. Pratyush, a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology ranked 78th on the November edition of the list.

Param Supercomputers: These Supercomputers were developed at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The name PARAM is very interesting as in Sanskrit it means “Supreme”, also creates an Acronym for “PARAllel Machine”.

Below is the list of PARAM supercomputers:

PARAM 8000 and 8600: The PARAM 8000 was the first machine in the series and was built from scratch. Released in the year 1991 and was a 256-node machine having a theoretical performance of 1GFLOPS. The next year, 1992, PARAM 8600 was built. It was an improvement over PARAM 8000 with a newly released Intel i860 processor and had a performance of 5GFLOPS

PARAM 8000

PARAM 9000: It was designed to merge cluster processing and massively parallel processing computing workloads. Released in the year 1994, its design was changed to be modular so that newer processors could be easily accommodated

PARAM 9000, Man seen is Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar, who built C-DAC and the first Supercomputer PARAM 8000

PARAM 10000: The PARAM 10000 was unveiled in 1998 as part of C-DAC’s second mission. The peak speed of this base system was 6.4 GFLOPS.

PARAM 10000

PARAM Padma: PARAM Padma (Lotus in Sanskrit) was introduced in December 2002. It had a peak speed of 1024 GFLOPS (about 1 TFLOPS).

PARAM PADMA

An engineer working on PARAM PADMA

PARAM Yuva: PARAM Yuva (Youth in Sanskrit) was unveiled in November 2008. It has a maximum sustainable speed (Rmax) of 38.1 TFLOPS and a peak speed (Rpeak) of 54 TFLOPS.

PARAM YUVA

Param Yuva II: PARAM Yuva II was unveiled on 8 February 2013. It was created in three months. The supercomputer can deliver a sustained performance of 360.8 TFLOPS

PARAM Yuva II

PARAM Brahma: It is a supercomputer offering a computational power of 850 TeraFlop with 1 PetaByte storage capacity. It is one of the supercomputers built in India under NSM, co-funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology. Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, is steering this mission. It was released in the year 2016.

PARAM BRAHMA

PARAM Siddhi-AI: Released in the year 2020, it ranks at 63rd rank in the list of 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

PRATYUSH and MIHIR: Pratyush means Rising Sun and MIHIR means Sun. Established at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune and National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF), Noida respectively, with a maximum speed of 6.8 PetaFlops. It was established at a cost of 438.9 Crore. They consist of several computers that deliver the maximum speed. They are the first muli-PetaFlops Supercomputers ever built in India. They too rank in the world’s top 500 supercomputers.

Pratyush Supercomputer

Credits: Google Photos