In a significant achievement for India's technological prowess, the country’s AI supercomputer 'AIRAWAT' has secured the 75th position in the prestigious Top 500 Global Supercomputing List. The announcement was made during the 61st edition of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) held in Germany. In sync with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of “AI for ALL”, this places India at the forefront of AI supercomputing nations worldwide. The installation of 'AIRAWAT' at C-DAC Pune is part of the National Program on AI initiated by the Government of India.

Supercomputers aggregate the computational power of multiple servers or compute devices for processing huge amounts of data and performing complex calculations. Earlier, Sayed Peerzade, EVP & Chief Cloud Officer, Yotta Infrastructure had told Business Today, “HPC conducts complex calculations at high speeds across multiple servers, simultaneously. Collectively known as clusters, these groups of servers are composed of hundreds or even thousands of servers connected through a network.”

To put things in perspective, a modern laptop or desktop can perform around 3 billion calculations per second. While this sounds incredibly fast, it is still far beneath HPC solutions which can perform quadrillions of calculations per second. But at the same time, depending on the scale of the project, building HPC systems can cost anywhere upwards of $25,000 and can go up to $1 billion, with the recurring operational cost involved.

Over the last six months, artificial intelligence has emerged as the most promising technology in the digital age. “India has a strong ecosystem and competitive advantage for AI due to its massive data availability, strong digital economy and skilled workforce. India has been working in the Applied AI with focus on Natural Language Processing, Image Procession, Pattern Recognition, Agriculture, Medical Imaging, Education, Health Care, Audio assistance, Robotics and developing solutions for the strategic sectors,” said Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary Alkesh Sharma. India will pursue AI technology to empower citizens and organisation to solve the most pressing problems of society and economy to make the world a better place, he added.