On May 24, 2023, India’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) Supercomputer ‘AIRAWAT’, has been ranked 75th globally in the 61st edition of Top 500 Global Supercomputing List which was released at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) in Germany.
- AIRAWAT or AI Research Analytics and Knowledge Dissemination Platform is installed at C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), Pune (Maharashtra) under National Program on AI (NPAI) by Government of India.
- The list has been topped by the United States (US) Frontier. This HPE Cray EX system is the first US system with a performance exceeding one Exaflop/s (EXA Floating point Operations per Second).
Note: AIRAWAT stands as India’s largest and fastest AI supercomputing system, with a remarkable speed of 13,170 teraflops (Rpeak).
Table Showing World’s Top 5 Supercomputers:
| Rank | System | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Frontier, HPE Cray EX235a | US |
| 2 | Supercomputer Fugaku, A64FX | Japan |
| 3 | LUMI, HPE Cray EX235a | Finland |
| 4 | Leonardo, Xeon Platinum 8358 32C | Italy |
| 5 | Summit, IBM Power System AC922 | US |
Table Showing India’s Supercomputers in Top 500 List::
| Rank | System | Installed At |
|---|---|---|
| 75 | AIRAWAT – PSAI – NVIDIA DGX A100, AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz, NVIDIA A100, Infiniband HDR, Netweb Technologies | C-DAC |
| 131 | PARAM Siddhi-AI – NVIDIA DGX A100, AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Atos | C-DAC |
| 169 | Pratyush – Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2695v4 18C 2.1GHz, Aries interconnect , HPE | Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune |
| 316 | Mihir – Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2695v4 18C 2.1GHz, Aries interconnect , HPE | National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, Noida, Uttar Pradesh |
About AIRAWAT:
i.Manufactured by Netweb Technologies, its processor is AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz or Operating System is Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS. It is currently funded by MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) and implemented by C-DAC, Pune.
ii.The AIRAWAT PoC (Proof of Concept) of 200 AI Petaflops integrated with PARAM Siddhi – AI of 210 AI Petaflops 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.
iii.MeitY has already envisioned roadmap for scaling AIRAWAT to 1,000 AI Petaflops Mixed Precision compute capacity to cater to the current AI computational needs.
iv.AIRAWAT will empower the Academia, Research Labs, Scientific Community, Industry and Start-Ups to develop indigenous AI enabled products/solutions for solving India specific challenges complex real-life problems.
About World’s Top 3 SuperComputers:
It is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, where it is operated for the Department of Energy (DOE). It currently has achieved 1.194 Exaflop/s using 8,699,904 cores. The HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) Cray EX architecture combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs optimized for HPC and AI, with AMD Instinct™ 250X accelerators, and Slingshot-11 interconnect.
- Fugaku, the No. 2 system, is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan; while world no 3rd, LUMI system, another HPE Cray EX system is installed at EuroHPC center at CSC in Kajaani, Finland with a performance of 309.1 Pflop/s.
Other TOP500 Highlights :
i.The TOP500 list shows that AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), Intel, and IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) processors are the preferred choice for HPC systems.
ii.China and the United States (US) earned most of the entries on the entire TOP500 list. iii.The US increased its lead from 126 machines to 150 on the current list, while China dropped from 162 systems to 134.
iv.In terms of entire continents, Asia saw 192 machines on the list, North America has 160 systems, and Europe has 133 systems.
v.In terms of system interconnects, ethernet is winner despite dropping from 233 machines to 227. It is followed by Infiniband interconnects with 200 machines, and Omnipath with 35 machines.
Recent Related News:
i.Marconi Society has awarded Hari Balakrishnan, an Indian-born Computer scientist, with the 2023 Marconi Prize for his fundamental discoveries in wired and wireless networking, mobile sensing, and distributed systems.
ii.Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Bombay, (Mumbai, Maharashtra)and IIT-Delhi(New Delhi, Delhi) are featured among the top 50 in the subject of Engineering and Technology in the QS(Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Rankings by Subject 2023.
About Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY):
Union Minister – Ashwini Vaishnaw (Rajya Sabha – Odisha)
Minister of State (MoS) – Rajeev Chandrasekhar
