Eight Nvidia H100 GPUs to be added to the Param Siddhi supercomputer

The Nvidia H100 GPUs, which are cutting-edge accelerators for computational workloads and artificial intelligence, are being added to the government's Param Siddhi HPC (high-performance computing) supercomputer, which is a part of the the Param Siddhi-Airawat AI (PSAI) supercomputer system. Nvidia A100 GPUs are now used to power Param Siddhi. Siddhi will be upgraded with eight Nvidia H100 GPUs, according to a tender released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

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 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 the bidder must have annual sales turnover of Rs 15 crore for the last three financial years.