32 years ago, The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was set up with the primary goal of building supercomputers. Over the years, C-DAC has set out on many initiatives including the Indian Language Computing Solutions, health informatics and applications of technology & electronics.

Today, C-DAC is pioneering R&D in the information technology and electronics domain in India. At RAISE 2020, C-DAC Director General Dr Hemant Darbari spoke at the MeitY showcase session, on the various accomplishments of C-DAC, and revealing its true might as the entity that could power the AI revolution in India.

Param Siddhi AI - C-DAC will be commissioning India’s largest HPC-AI supercomputer ‘PARAM Siddhi AI, a machine with 210 AI Petaflops (6.5 Petaflops Peak DP). Param Siddhi AI will be based on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture comprising of 42 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, connected with NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networking along with indigenously developed HPC-AI engine, Software Frameworks, Cloud Platform by C-DAC. Incidentally, C-DAC started its foray into supercomputing with PARAM 1GF in 1988.

Param Shavak – The Param Shavak machine aims to provide computational resource with advanced technologies to perform high-end computations for scientific, engineering and academic programs that can address and catalyze research using modelling, simulation and data analysis. This initiative is expected to create HPC-aware skilled workforce and promote research by integrating leading-edge emerging technologies at grassroot level. This has 317 Teraflops peak computing power with 8GB storage, and powered with 2 multicore CPUs each with a minimum of 14 cores. There are four variants of Param Shavak – HPC System, DL GPU and VR system (virtual reality). Param Shavak Srishti – a gen next bio informatics appliance for bio and agriculture was launched by MoS Sanjay Dhotre in Jan 2020 in Maharashtra.

Exa-Scale Computing Mission – C-DAC is on a mission to establish dependable and secure exa-scale ecosystem designs and disruptive technologies – this includes the design and manufacture of server boards, interconnects and storage with embedded silicon photonics – to make India a leader in high end software development.

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) HPC Infrastructure – This includes the Param Shivay 650 Petaflops supercomputing facility at IIT Varanasi and another 650 Petaflops Param Brahma Supercomputing facility at IISER Pune. A 1.3 Petaflops Param Shakti Supercomputing facility at IIT Kharagpur. So far, more than 1800 supercomputing faculties have been trained and cumulatively trained over 573,000 HPC jobs.

Build Approach – Now Phase 2 of these systems are being manufactured in India, and Phase 3 systems are being designed and manufactured in India. The Rudra server, developed with the Intel processor and pilot HPC system was launched last month, and Phase 3 systems are being planned more than 30 Petaflops. In addition, the indigenous products include Trinetra HPC Interconnect, HPC software stack development and HPC processor.

AI and Language Computing – One of the earliest projects spearheaded by C-DAC was Indian language computing. With superior advancements in hardware and software today, including AI and NLP, C-DAC is keen to leverage this experience over thirty years to develop Bahubhakshak Speech to Speech Translation Systems and IE/IR systems for agriculture, healthcare, education, legal and banking domains. In addition, C-DAC wants to facilitate and mentor startups to develop AI based solutions for various use cases that can cater to India’s diverse population.

HPC For Social Good

The applications of C-DAC's HPC are vast, and have a significant impact on social sectors. So far, C-DAC has been able to apply HPC capabilities to develop flood warning and prediction systems for river basins in India, seismic imaging to aid oil and gas exploration, urban modelling, genomics and drug discovery, materials and computational chemistry and the design and development of Direct Contact Liquid Cooling systems.