Supercomputer Param Siddhi

• 20 Nov 2020

Why in News

India’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) supercomputer Param Siddhi ranked 63^rd among top 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world.

• Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another. The components interact with one another in order to achieve a common goal.
• In a non-distributed (or co-located) system, all the parts of the system are in the same physical location. In a distributed system, parts of the system exist in separate locations.

Key Points

• Param Siddhi is a High Performance Computing-Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer developed by Department of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
• The supercomputer has Rpeak of 5.267 Petaflops and 4.6 Petaflops Rmax.
  
  • 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.
  • A system's Rmax score describes its maximal achieved performance, the Rpeak 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.

National Supercomputing Mission

• The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and Research and Development (R&D) institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
• Launched in 2015, this seven-year mission was allocated Rs 4,500-crore.
• These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN).
  
  • The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network.
  • Academic and R&D institutions as well as key user departments/ministries would participate by using these facilities and develop applications of national relevance.
  • The Mission also includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications.
• The Mission is implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).
• The (C-DAC) has recently launched the second phase of this project wherein more institutions will be supported by supercomputing facilities.
• Objective of NSM
  
  • To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
  • To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains

Source:PIB