The globally top-ranked supercomputer – Param Siddhi – AI has been a remarkable combination of Supercomputers and Artificial Intelligence, giving a platform for various such developments!

The National Supercomputing Mission (SM), has a wide goal ahead, with loads of improvement and career opportunity carved with technological development, advancement, upliftment, and rise in the technology and skills. This has lead Indians to dream, plan, work, develop, and deploy the greatest of their works.

The proposal of the Government of India- NSM aims to create seventy supercomputers that would connect and advance various fields ranging from education to defense. This has made us capable of standing on our own, think, and develop. With this agenda and the power of Artificial Intelligence, we are now a technically advanced nation. But it requires consistent will and technical achievement to maintain that flame and one of the biggest achievements in the domain of supercomputers and artificial intelligence is the – Param Siddhi AI.

A great achievement of India, launched on 16^th November 2020, under the goals of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), is a high-performance supercomputing computer that is based on Artificial Intelligence.

The globally ranked, 63 out of 500, top powerful supercomputer – Param Siddhi AI is the most powerful and non-distributed computer system that can be applied to various domains. It ranges from astrophysics to computational chemistry and various advanced materials. It is one of the biggest boons at the time of this pandemic. One of the biggest disadvantages of COVID-19 is the reduction in the quickness of any particular thing that one has to do, it may be a human or a machine.

In a century with growing datasets, statistical models, and the need to sort them and get visualizations for further training or data analysis, we require supercomputers embedded with the power of Artificial Intelligence for fast and accurate computing with the ability to think and work like humans, i.e., the machine should be able to evaluate the result itself by evaluating the data provided and drawing proper patterns and trends from the data.

Under the NSM, there are many domains of concern like weather forecasting, food supply, natural disaster, and much more for various states and cities. The main aim is to make India self-sufficient on the grounds of technology in almost all the sectors for better future prediction and development so that we would be able to prepare for future risks and would have sufficient facilities available to manage situations like COVID-19.

This project is a boon for start-ups and MSMEs particularly. Here, we are pacing towards progress to fight against the pandemic – COVID 19 through various forecasting and prevention methods. It has a vast domain of computational chemistry, physics, mathematics various geo-exploration packages, and forecasting techniques. This helps in the prediction of various things like weather, oil price trends, and much more. Hence, it has its influence over all the factors on which the rise of the market depends along with the capability of forecasting future patterns and trends. This helps in proper planning and management of resources at the initial level so that in the coming future everyone would be prepared to tackle such situations.

Param Siddhi, the supercomputer, was developed with the help of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under NSM, which has initiated this project. It comes with the Rpeak of 5.267 and has 4.6 Petaflops Rmax.

Making its global record as Top 63 out of 500 supercomputers, Param Siddhi has made a remarkable place in the history of Indian technical development. It is quite a great achievement for our nation and all the young minds and inspiration sources behind this great success. This marvelous achievement has widened the scope of Artificial Intelligence and Supercomputers, it will lead a step towards the growth and progress of the nation by encouraging our future pillars and the bright minds to come forward with their ideas and strategies that they will willingly implement and show their skills and knowledge that they have gained in the specific domain.

We have numerous challenges ahead and the solution of an existing challenge gives the way for more challenges, with each challenge leading us a step towards digitalization, advancement, and progress. In various sectors like education, energy, space, medicine, we are facing a lot of problems and this fusion of Supercomputers and Artificial Intelligence has provided us a new and strong platform which can be embedded with various other technologies by skilled hands and sharp minds to solve the upcoming problems and challenges. This is a field that will step towards advancement and progress, each passing day, and will provide a wide scope for us to give our contribution in all possible ways. Various technologies like Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Visual Computing, Software Frameworks, Virtual Reality, Accelerated Computing, Graphics Visualization, and much more have been the main source of knowledge and skills for these machines. Param Siddhi is a great example of these technologies with the NVidia DGX Super POD reference architecture networking along with C-DAC’s developed HPC-AI engine on which it is built.

 This advancement has stunned the whole world due to high functionalities which lead it to cross the boundaries and rank 63 among 500 globally ranked supercomputers. Being one of the NSM projects, it has developed with high accuracy and skill. This is a big example for all the future works and has created a benchmark for all such projects which are yet to be deployed. This kind of model comes with high dedication, technology ad resourceful information that leads towards the clustering of all valuable and quality techniques and ideas. 

The technologies – Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Graphical Visualisation, Machine learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networking, Big Data, and much more are the main reason behind the development of such projects. So to develop enhance machines, one needs to have in-depth knowledge of these topics so that the person can work on his specific domain of interest.

Being the second Indian computer in the top 100 globally ranked list, Param Siddhi is the best combination of Supercomputer which make computing of big data exceptionally faster and accurate and of Artificial Intelligence which brings life in the machine, i.e., making the machine able to evaluate data sets and take the decision on its own.

Below we have discussed the important concepts, with which one should be familiar to understand the actual concept behind Param Siddhi – AI.

Artificial Intelligence – The Core Layer

Artificial Intelligence, the most popular technology, has evolved the whole technical domain by bringing the concept of self-sufficient machines. It has brought the concept of training the machines and making them capable of taking decisions on their own and having the capability to think and make decisions like humans to analyze a broad perspective within minimum time and give the best possible output.

With the wide applications of Artificial Intelligence like fraud detection, email filtering, sales forecasting, speech recognition, voice recognition, face recognition, and much more, it has its roots in almost all the fields, whether it would be related to education, medicine, defense, cybercrime or any other industry. The ability to modify this technology with other technologies like Big Data, Neural Networking, or anything else, has led it to provide solutions to various challenges and make it is base stronger.

Artificial Intelligence simply means to make the computers intelligent so that they don’t need to be programmed specifically for each condition or change in the environment, it means making them robust so that they could decide the best way on their own – just like humans! This is the main goal.  In highly statistical words, it is the interdisciplinary branch of computer science with the main layers of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence which aims in developing machines that perform tasks just like humans, i.e., they have human intelligence.

The term Intelligence has a broader meaning, it comprises of many things which together define how the machines should act! This includes – learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language. These terms have a great significance of their own.

Learning is the initial step of Artificial Intelligence which means to train the machine. The foremost requirement to make a machine intelligent is to train it, only then it would be able to draw patterns and trends on its own. This is done by using sample training datasets. We take sample datasets on which we train the machines that how it needs to evaluate the input to get the output, how to draw patterns and trends, how to get the accurate result, and how to proceed. These different types of datasets are taken so that the machine could learn various types of problems and will learn how to evaluate the more precise results. This is one of the essential steps as this will enable the machines to do processing on their own. Hence the datasets should be taken properly and the machine should be trained with both quantitative and qualitative datasets. In this way, we will get the machine with the best processing power and we don’t need to spoon-feed it with different algorithms or commands with new or changing situations.

Then comes reasoning which is the crucial step towards making the machine able to think itself. Once we have trained the machine, we need to do proper reasoning to draw appropriate inferences. The inferences are classified as deductive and inductive. In inductive, we prepare proper data models to describe and predict future values. This is based on science where we collect data, train the machine, and then draw models to get the future prediction of the test datasets. The other we have deductive inference based on mathematics and logic. In this, we use the statistical way to get the output by using various equations and mathematical approach to solve for the given set of values.

The third step is problem-solving which indicates that’s the model has been trained and reasoned and now we are ready to use it for an actual set of values to get the best possible outcome. This is the time when the machine uses its past training and experiences to give a solution to the desired problem statement. This is the important step that should take care of all the factors associated with the evaluation of the problem statement and its analysis to draw the best pattern from the data set and finally reach the best possible conclusion that could solve the problem more efficiently and effectively. This is done step by step and machines designed for different purposes have different procedures to solve any query and the problem-solving techniques are classified into special-purpose problem solving and general-purpose problem-solving. In special-purpose problem solving, the machines have specific features and mechanisms for specific problem statements which may be exceptionally large datasets or datasets with high computations and so on. In general-purpose problem solving, we can have a wide range of queries that can be solved using the defined mechanism step by step or in an incremental manner.

The fourth step is perception, which includes the adaptation of machines with changing environments, i.e., with different types of queries asked. It means that the machine should be able to think like humans, take all the points affecting any problem statement into consideration, and evaluate accordingly. It means that the machine should have a broad perception and evaluation level so that it should analyze all the queries efficiently and the output will satisfy maximum people.

The last layer is the main communication pathway, i.e., how the output will be received. The communication mechanism and type that the machine uses should be understandable on the output side. Also, the input provided by us should be convertible into the specific form required by the computer. The computer then does the processing part and at the time of output delivery, the generated output should be transformed into the format that we can understand. This is the essential step because if there is any problem at the input or output side of communication then the whole model is a waste.

Hence, with all these steps and motives, Artificial Intelligence is pacing rapidly towards the growth of the industries and within each new concept, it is adding its flavor to give a new technological gift to the industry.

Super Computers – The Main Body

Supercomputers are high computing and powerful computers that perform high computing, fast solving, and various other high-performance tasks. Ordinary computers aren’t suitable for Big Data processing and for such data we require supercomputers who have the ability and the capacity to solve problems within minimum time. They have extremely high computational speed and give the most precise output. They are widely used for computing big data, complex data, weather forecasting, nuclear weapons, the study of the cosmos, chemical compounds, and much more. Their use and demand are widely increasing.

One of their main usages is in the market as well where they use different statistical models to evaluate the given input and do the forecasting in the best possible manner. They are used to study trends and patterns of the data set and this is further used for forecasting future sales and market growth.

They consist of multicore processors with parallel programming mechanisms that enable them to solve highly complicated queries at a high pace. They mostly use symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and massively parallel processing (MPP). In recent years, e have developed various supercomputers with high computational speed and accurate results. It uses the array of compute nodes for faster computing.

How Supercomputers boosts Artificial Intelligence

With the rapid growth and clustering of technology, new ideas are emerging which have formulated skills into the greatest achievements with Param Siddhi as one of the biggest examples of India. This is the fusion of Artificial Intelligence and Supercomputers. The ability of machines to give fast and accurate outputs of high and difficult computations along with the intelligence of humans is the biggest achievement.

This is just a start, when we are at the initial level, developing new models with the combination of various technologies. Once we have such combinations, then after a few years they would be the base of more such combinations of new models and in this way, more and more effective models would be generated. The idea was a kick start for the making of a marvelous machine with high-quality computation, high speed, advanced problem-solving capability and capacity, multiple and parallel processing, wide space, and the most important thing – Intelligence, i.e., Artificial Intelligence, which allows them to think and work like humans.

This makes work easy, effective, and accurate. In this way we achieve accurate output without any manual work or much brainstorming as all of our work is done by the machines. This saves time and the result generated is effective and efficient.

Param Siddhi – AI

One of the greatest achievements of India, the largest HPC-AI Supercomputer, Param Siddhi – AI under NSM, was headed by Abhishek Das (Scientist and Program Director) at C-DAC.

The machine consists of 210 AI Petaflops, 6.5 Petaflops DP and is built on NVidia DGX Super POD reference architecture consisting of 42 NVidia DGX A100 systems which are connected with NVidia Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networking along HPC-AI engine developed by C-DAC and Cloud Platforms, and Software Frameworks.

What are Petaflops?

Petaflops are the units of computing speed. Mathematically, a petaflop is equal to one thousand million million (10¹⁵) floating-point operators per second. It is the measure that tells us about how many arithmetic operations can a machine perform in a second and hence gives us the measure of the performance of the system.

Non – Distributed Computer Systems

A non-distributed computer system is a system which has all its associated parts (external hardware components), located at a single location. Param Siddhi is a non-distributed computer system, with all its associated parts currently located at Pune. The computer system is used in various sectors such as research, health, and medicine, education, agriculture, the market, etc. This has provided a huge benefit to the nation.

National Supercomputing Mission – NSM

The government of India has planned to create seventy supercomputers which could be used in a wide variety of fields across India and this plan is named as National Supercomputing Mission – NSM, with the aim of development and progress of fields such as education, research, health, market, agriculture, etc.

It has been provided the budget of Rs.4500 crore for 7 years and was approved in April 2015. It aims towards making India self-sufficient in the technical domain so that we can also compete and progress in the technically pacing era.

Technological development is a high necessity right now and in the future, it would just like the basic need of a human being. So, we must do our best in this field.

Future Scope

With remarkable output provided by the Param Siddhi – AI, it is once again proven that such technological developments and advancements are the requirements for development. In the coming future, there is a wide scope for such developments. The main goal of NSE, i.e., to generate seven supercomputers within the time frame of seven years starting from April 2015 will get a successful end as per the statistical predictions.

This is quite a grateful thing to mention that the Param Siddhi – AI is globally ranked at 63 positions out of 500 positions among the World’s best supercomputers. The combination of supercomputers and Artificial Intelligence has led us a step towards progress. More such achievements are waiting in the future, we just need to focus and enhance our skills and creativity.

Artificial Intelligence is a base for development and innovative ideas. So, a creative and eager mind needs to gain skills and start the journey in this field!