Param Siddhi supercomputer to be upgraded with 8 Nvidia H100 GPUs, more nodes

The logo of Nvidia Corporation is seen during the annual Computex computer exhibition in Taipei

The government is upgrading Param Siddhi HPC (high-performance computing) supercomputer with Nvidia H100 GPUs, which are advanced accelerators for artificial intelligence and computational workloads.

Param Siddhi is currently powered by Nvidia A100 GPUs. In a tender floated by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the ministry of electronics and information technology said it would upgrade Siddhi with eight Nvidia H100 GPUs. This is one of the most advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) in Nvidia's hierarchy.

Together with the Param Siddhi-Airawat AI (PSAI), the supercomputer has been set up under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at C-DAC Pune. The two supercomputers cumulatively have 410 AI PFLOP —210 AI PFLOP for Param Siddhi and 200 AI PFLOP for Airawat AI.

FLOPS, or floating point operations per second, is a way to measure how fast a computer can do calculations. 1 AI PFLOP means it can solve 1 quadrillion AI related calculations in a second.

With the new GPUs, the supercomputer system will be able to tackle larger, more complex workloads in AI and HPC. It will also improve the system's capabilities in training AI models, running simulations and performing deep learning operations.

The H100 GPUs belong to the Hopper architecture family, and supersede the Nvidia A100 (ampere architecture) and V100 (volta architecture), offering significant improvements in performance, memory, etc.

The tender floated on August 30 also says it would add eight more nodes to the supercomputer. Siddhi has 42 nodes.

A node is a high-performance server or computer that works independently but is connected with other nodes to form a cluster.

Based on the Nvidia H100's the potential increase, taking into consideration eight H100 GPUs and eight nodes being added, it can increase its capacity by an estimated 126 AI PFLOPS, making the total power of PSAI supercomputer 536 AI PFLOP, approximately.

The government has invited bids from either original equipment manufacturers, or their respective Indian subsidiary or an authorised system integrator/dealer in India. The government has also said that bidder must have annual sales turnover of Rs 15 crore for the last three financial years.