India flips the switch on three homebrew supercomputers

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi yesterday dedicated three new supercomputers, and made the machines a symbol of his economic, social, and industry policies.

Those emphases mean Modi didn't detail the tech specs of the three "PARAM Rudra" machines – but the orgs that will run them have revealed some info.

India's National Centre for Radio Astrophysics has revealed that its machine features "several thousands of Intel CPUs and 90 state-of-the-art Nvidia A100 GPUs, 35 terabytes of memory, and two petabytes of storage."

The A100 is not state of the art – Nvidia's current champ is the H100 and the H200 will arrive any week now.

The S.N. Bose Centre for Basic Sciences mentioned an 838 TFLOPS system in a social media post about the PM's launch.

The Inter-University Accelerator Centre appears not to have disclosed the disposition of its machine, but has previously teased a three-petaflop machine built on Intel Xeon 2nd Gen scalable processors with up to 24 cores each, packing four petabytes of storage capacity and hooked up to a 240Gbit/sec interconnect.

That spec sheet is notable because it matches info in published documents [PDF] that describe [PDF] the spec for India's first-gen Rudra-class machines as employing:

• A Rudra half-width server motherboard design that can be built into machines that are either 1U or 2U, allowing up 64 servers in a rack with 40KW power draw, and packing the following hardware:
• • Two second-gen Xeon Scalable processors (Cascade Lake circa 2019);
  • Two unspecified GPUs;
  • Two SSDs on U.2 connectors;
  • A single NIC in addition to two preinstalled 10Gbit/sec Ethernet ports;
• The "Trinetra" interconnect – a made-in-India tech that offers six 100Gbit/sec full duplex interfaces;
• Locally developed direct liquid cooling tech.

Second-gen Rudra machines support fourth-gen Xeons and four GPUs.

A planned third generation of Rudra machines will use a 96-core processor designed by India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing using the Arm 8.4 architecture and built by TSMC on its 5nm process.

The Register can't imagine Modi would not have trumpeted the arrival of that processor in these supers. We're guessing they're still in the works.

• India funds Moon lander, space station module, and Venus orbiter
• India signs local server-maker to build nodes for home-grown supercomputers
• Lenovo turns to India as source of AI servers
• India’s Reserve Bank fines HPE's financial services arm

This launch is still a big deal for India – and Modi – as it adds to the national supercomputing fleet and means locally designed tech has been deployed. Given India's size and rapid pace of development, HPC vendors may wonder what they need to do to get into the market.

Modi also flipped the switch on an HPC system dedicated to weather and climate research. Details are again scarce, but the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has stated the system runs in two locations: one with 11.77 PETAflops capacity and 33 petabytes of storage, and the other with 8.24 PetaFLOPS and 24 petabytes. Both run alongside a 1.9 PetaFLOP machine dedicated to AI and ML. ®