India well placed to lead high performance computing, says AMD executive

India's supercomputing mission is advancing steadily with govt backing and public-private partnerships, positioning the country to move ahead in high-performance computing, says AMD's Thomas Zacharia

India’s supercomputing mission is on track and will be bolstered by more government initiatives and collaboration between the public and the private sector, says Thomas Zacharia, senior vice-president of strategic technology partnerships and public policy at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

 

Zacharia, who joined the chipmaker earlier this year from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, was in India to attend the country’s first Supercomputing India event in Bengaluru earlier this month.

 

“The government of India, through public and public-private partnerships, has made very strong progress, which is exciting. India has the potential to continue to advance and become a leader in high performance computing (HPC) and quantum,” he said.

 

What role is AMD playing in India’s supercomputing ecosystem? 

Zacharia leads the global expansion of AMD’s public and private relationships with governments and other organisations to help fast-track the deployment of customised AMD-powered artificial intelligence solutions to meet the rapidly growing number of global projects and applications targeting AI deployment. He did not comment on the nature of work the company is doing with the Indian government.

 

How is the National Supercomputing Mission shaping India’s HPC capacity? 

The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is a flagship initiative by the government to empower the country’s HPC capabilities, besides fostering research and development and supporting scientific advancements across academia, industry and government sectors.

 

Under NSM, a total of 37 supercomputers with a combined compute capacity of 39 petaflops have been deployed across various academic institutions, research organisations and R&D labs, such as the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. The supercomputing systems have achieved an overall utilisation rate of over 85 per cent, with many systems exceeding 95 per cent. Ten more systems are slated to be completed by next March.

 

What are India’s next goals in supercomputing and indigenisation? 

Under NSM 2.0, the government is targeting exascale computing, which is higher than petaflops. At present, the world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, delivers over two exaflops of performance for United States Department of Energy national security missions.

 

India is also targeting complete indigenisation of its HPC by 2030, with production set to be rolled out by 2032.

 

What challenges does large-scale computing infrastructure face? 

Zacharia, however, cautioned that such high computing requires a heavy amount of power, the supply of which is a global challenge. Worldwide, there has been an outcry against the setting up of data centres, which are known to consume enormous amounts of power and water to cool systems, often putting them at odds with the local ecology.

 

“Bigger compute infrastructure requires bigger power and that is a cycle. We have to design power systems that are efficient for high performance computing, which will in turn support these,” he said.