India to get nine more supercomputers: Which are the fastest in the country?

India is slated to get nine more supercomputers. This comes after the Cabinet on Wednesday approved Rs 14,903 crore to extend the Digitial India project.[ar Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said India will add nine more supercomputers to its tally of 18 supercomputers under the National Supercomputing Mission (NCM). But is a supercomputer? And which are the fastest supercomputers in India? Let’s take a closer look: What is a supercomputer? According to the website Spiceworks.com, a supercomputer is an extremely powerful device that can perform complex calculations and simulations. A supercomputer processes data in extremely powerful units known as floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). The higher the FLOPS, the more powerful the supercomputer.

One petaflop is equal to 1,000 trillion flops.

As per Computerhope.com, supercomputers can be used to perform a wide variety of applications including

• Quantum mechanics
• Artificial Intelligence research
• Weather forecasting
• Oil and gas explorations
• Molecular modelling
• Physics calculations
• Nuclear fusion research
• Medical research
• Cryptanalysis

All the top supercomputers use a Linux-based operating system, as per the website. As per Hindu Business Line, US and China have the most supercomputers. As per The Hindu, the fastest high-performance supercomputer in the world is the Frontier-Cray system at the Oakridge National Laboratory in the United States.

This system has a peak speed of 1 exa-flop (around 1,000 petaflops).

The other fastest systems range from 60 to 400 petaflops. Which are the fastest supercomputers in India? As per InShorts, India’s fastest supercomputers are AIRAWAT, PARAM Siddhi, Pratyush and Mihir. AIRAWAT, which was installed earlier this year at the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, is India’s biggest and faster supercomputer.

As per The Times of India, it has an incredible speed of 13,170 teraflops.

Developed by Netweb Technologies, it runs on the Ubuntu operating system and is powered by AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz processor with 81,344 cores. It ranked number 75 at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany in May and was listed as such in the 61st edition of the Top 500 Global Supercomputing list. Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary Shri Alkesh Sharma said at the time, “Artificial Intelligence is the most promising technology in the digital age. India has a strong ecosystem and competitive advantage for AI due to its massive data availability, strong digital economy and skilled workforce. India has been working in the Applied AI with focus on Natural Language Processing, Image Procession, Pattern Recognition, Agriculture, Medical Imaging, Education, Health Care, Audio assistance, Robotics and developing solutions for the strategic sectors.” E Magesh, director general, C-DAC, said, “Currently being the fastest Supercomputer in the country, it is designed and architected to be on a scalable infrastructure to act as a common computational cloud platform connecting all Centres of Research Excellence in AI, Indian Centres for Transformational AI, Academic, Research Labs, Scientific Community, Industry and Start-ups. We have initiated the process of on-boarding start-ups and MSMEs working in AI domains in the country.”

The PARAM Siddhi, also installed at C-DAC, Pune,  ranked no 131 on the top 500 list.

It is powered by the NVIDIA DGX A100, AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Atos. As per NDTV, the machine, when combined with AIRAWAT,  gives a total peak compute of 410 AI Petaflops Mixed Precision and sustained compute capacity of 8.5 Petaflops (Rmax) Double Precision. The peak compute capacity (Double Precision, Rpeak) is 13 Petaflops. According to the CDAC website, the PARAM Siddhi aims to serve as AI / HPC specific Cloud Computing Infrastructure for INDIA subsuming academia, R&D institutes and start-ups. The Pratyush supercomputer, which ranked at 169, is installed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, as per The Times of India. The Cray XC40 machine’s key specs are Xeon E5-2695v4 18C 2.1GHz, Aries interconnect, HPE. The Mihir supercomputer, which ranks 316th on the top 500 list, is also a Cray XC40 machine. It is powered by Xeon E5-2695v4 18C 2.1GHz, Aries interconnect and HPE. It is installed at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Noida, as per NDTV. As per The Hindu, Pratyush and Mihir have a combined capacity of 6.8 petaflops.

They were operationalised in 2018 at a cost of ₹438 crore

The Digital India scheme was launched in 2015 to increase internet connectivity and digitally empower the nation. The Centre had initially approved the installation of 70 supercomputers under National Supercomputing Mission (NCM) at an outlay of ₹ 4,500 crore Vaishnaw said that the extended Digital India project will add to the work done under the previous version of the scheme. With inputs from agencies