Indian supercomputer Param Siddhi has achieved 63rd rank in the list of 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) said on Wednesday.
Param Siddhi is the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer established under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at C-DAC.
“It is a historical first. India today has one of the largest supercomputer infrastructures in the world and that is evidenced by the ranking that Param Siddhi-AI has received today,” said Secretary Department of Science & Technology Ashutosh Sharma in a statement.
“I truly believe that Param Siddhi-AI will go a long way in empowering our national academic and R&D institutions as well as industries and start-ups spread over the country networked on the national supercomputer grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN),” he added.
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.
The supercomputer will also help in acceleration of research and development in the fight against COVID19 through faster simulations, medical imaging, genome sequencing and forecasting and is a boon for Indian masses and for start-ups and MSMEs in particular.
The supercomputer with Rpeak of 5.267 Petaflops and 4.6 PetaflopsRmax (Sustained) was conceived by C-DAC and developed jointly with support of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under NSM.
“It is a boon for application developers and will help testing of weather forecasting packages by NCMRWF & IITM, geo-exploration packages for oil and gas recovery, packages for aero-design studies, computational physics and mathematical applications and even online courses for education,” the DST said.
The Top 500 project which ranks the top 500 non-distributed computer systems in the world is published twice a year.
The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November.