Param Siddhi supercomputer

Why in news?

• India’s AI supercomputer Param Siddhi 63rd among top 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world.

About Param Siddhi:

• It is a high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer established under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at C-DAC.
• 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 platform for drug design and preventive health care system, flood forecasting package for flood prone metro cities.
• This will accelerate R&D in 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.
•  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 supercomputer with Rpeak of 5.267 Petaflops and 4.6 Petaflops Rmax (Sustained) was conceived by C-DAC and developed jointly with support of Department of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under NSM.
• Param Siddhi Supercomputer is built on theNVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture networking along with C-DAC’s indigenously developed HPC-AI engine, software frameworks and cloud platform and will help deep learning, visual computing, virtual reality, accelerated computing, as well as graphics virtualization.

PRELIMS QUESTION

Consider the following statements regarding National Supercomputing mission:
1.The nodal agencies spearheading the mission are Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bengaluru.
2.It has a budget allocation of Rs.4500 Crores
Which among the above statements is/are correct?
(a)1 only 
(b)2 only 
(c)Both 1 and 2
(d)Neither 1 nor 2

Answer to prelims question