India is among first four countries to order the NVIDIA system
Pune; October 6, 2020 . The  Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)  has announced that it will shortly commission  India’s  fastest  High Performance Computing (HPC)  Artificial Intelligence (AI) supercomputer to be names  ‘PARAM Siddhi – AI’.
The machine  will deliver   210 AI Petaflops (6.5 Petaflops Peak DP), and will consist of 42 blocks of 42  of the NVIDIA DGX A100 universal system for AI workloads, each of which can deliver  5 petaflops  ( 5x 42= 210). Together they will reconstruct  the architecture of the  NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD  --  which is currently number seven in the world’s ranking of Top 500 supercomputers.
The hardware will be entirely imported from US-based NVIDIA. Software for the HPC-AI engine, Software Frameworks, Cloud Platform  will be developed by C-DAC.
 NVIDIA  CEO Jensen Huang  announced at the  GPU Technology conference, October 5,  that DGX SuperPODs are now shipping and are expected to be installed in Korea, the U.K., Sweden and India before the end of the year.
Says Dr Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC: "PARAM Siddhi – AI, the State-of-the-Art large-scale HPC-AI scalable infrastructure that will be established under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with support from Niti Aayog, Ministry of Electronics and IT, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India using NVIDIA Next Generation technology, C-DAC software stack and Cloud platform will play a pivotal role in developing a vibrant ecosystem for research and innovation in science and engineering. This infrastructure will accelerate experiments and outcomes for India specific grand challenge problems in Health Care, Education, Energy, Cyber Security, Space, Automotive and Agriculture. It will catalyze partnerships with the Academia, Industry, MSMEs and Start-ups."
We are featuring a video on the NVIDIA system in the Tech Video spot of our home page

IndiaTechOnline comment:  Having bought multiple Bull/Atos  supercomouting systems in the first phase of the National Supercomputing Mission, India seemingly has decided to continue  taking  the 'buy' rather than 'build' route to  attain competence in  high performance computing.  The NVIDIA acquisition today dwarfs the 2 XC 40 petaflop  systems acquired from  Cray that currently make it to the global  Top 500 rankings, that are capable of  2.5- 3.7 peta flops.
With little visibility of indigenous development delivering  a platform capable of tens of petaflops, in the near future, those deciding things in the NSM seem to have  gone for an import-fueled short cut to access this level of computational muscle.  This may be pragmatic. But it leaves unaddressed the  compulsion  for India to 'own' the IP required to build her own supercomputers for hardnosed stategic reasons. The NSM started with a kitty of  Rs 45 billion (Rs 4500 crore).  But how much will be left for indigenous development  by the time the 'buy' phase  is over?