India's AI supercomputer 'AIRAWAT' ranked 75th in Global Supercomputing list

Tags: INDEX Science and Technology

The AI Supercomputer ‘AIRAWAT’, installed at C-DAC, Pune has been ranked 75th in the top 500 Global Supercomputing List.

An overview of the news

• The announcement was made during the 61st edition of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) held in Germany.

• The establishment of 'AIRAWAT' at C-DAC Pune is part of the National Program on AI initiated by the Government of India.

About supercomputer AIRAWAT

• AIRAWAT is the name for an in-house cloud platform for big data. 

• The proposed AIRAWAT system is a 100+ petaflop AI-focused supercomputer.

• There are parallels drawn to Japan’s AI Bridging Cloud Interface supercomputer in the NITI Aayog report. 

• This system is a 130 petaflop computer focused on providing compute for AI, ML and big data tasks.

What are supercomputers?

• A supercomputer can perform high-level processing at a faster rate than a normal computer.

• They work together to perform complex operations that are not possible with normal computing systems.

• Fast speed and fast memory are the characteristics of supercomputers.

• The performance of a supercomputer is generally evaluated in petaflops.

National Supercomputing Mission

• The National Supercomputing Mission was launched In 2015.

• The aim of the mission was to enhance the research capacities in the country to form a Supercomputing grid.

• It supports the government's vision of 'Digital India' and 'Make in India' initiatives.

• The mission is being jointly operated by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

• It is implemented by Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and IISc, Bengaluru.

Some important facts about supercomputer

• China has the maximum number of supercomputers followed by the US, Japan, France, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland and the United Kingdom..

• India’s first supercomputer - PARAM 8000

• first supercomputer assembled indigenously - PARAM Shivay, installed in IIT (BHU)

• PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak are some name of india's supercomputers.

• India's PARAM-Siddhi AI, has been ranked 63rd in the Top 500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world.