With the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) agreeing to manufacture 7,000 Rudra I, the first indigenous server, for various institutions of higher learning and premier research institutions funded by the Government of India, News18 speaks to an industry expert on the potential of Rudra I and the possibilities.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, had launched Rudra I last December. The C-DAC created it as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
It was stated that the server design can be used to build traditional standalone commercial servers as well as building blocks for large supercomputing systems with tens of petaflops of computing performance.
As per a recent report by News18, the government intends to licence the Rudra I Server technology to companies that can assemble, manufacture, and sell it in the market, including the global market, at competitive prices.
An official statement also noted that Rudra is poised to demonstrate India’s capability to design, develop, build, and deliver on the nation’s multidisciplinary computing needs, as well as is of critical strategic and national significance.
Market Potential
Rushikesh Jadhav, Chief Technology Officer, ESDS Software Solutions Ltd, a Nasik-based company, which has expanded to 19 nations across APAC, Europe, the Middle East, Americas, and Africa, told News18 that x86 (Intel or AMD) based servers market is huge.
The x86 family of instruction set architectures was first created by Intel.
According to Jadhav, almost all industries run on the x86 platform, which includes banking, industrial ERP, hospitals, startups, defence, and government citizen-centric workloads.
He said that server-side programs, which enable the internet such as the Web, Apps, as well as databases, run on similar x86 platforms and “these are all compatible with the Rudra I server”.
As per the expert, with the primitive design and development, Rudra I’s security level will be quite dependable.
“ESDS itself can benefit from these indigenous servers by introducing thousands of them in its Cloud landscape, in fact, our community clouds such as banking, government, and enterprise can run on these Rudra I servers,” he added.
The CTO of ESDS, which is a catalyst for Digital Transformation in the modern outcome-based economy by enabling organizations to embrace advanced technologies, stated that the government has been nudging businesses towards complete digitisation, which is leading to the demand for data centres and hyper-scale infrastructure to grow equally.
He believes that while the overall technology market is rapidly growing, these servers will add more to this growth, making its potential quite promising.
Jadhav also said: “I think launching Rudra I is a vital first step towards a long journey in the x86 computing world.”
This initiative, according to him, should be highly applauded and boosted for the benefit of the Indian cloud service providers. Additionally, he suggested that the government and enterprises should introduce additional marks for cloud service providers using Rudra I for the workloads in tenders.
He said: “Rudra I server is a two-socket server. Once the industry adopts Rudra I, we will be eager to wait for the four-socket and subsequently eight-socket servers in the Rudra series.”
“Cloud requires dense workload processing abilities and such improvisations will benefit the industry. Rudra I server coupled with Trinetra interconnect form a reliable combination for HPC,” he noted.
Supercomputers
Supercomputers, also known as the fastest computers in the world, have historically been used for scientific and engineering applications that require the management of enormous databases, intensive computation, or both. Now, the technology—supercomputing—is often used to run artificial intelligence programs.
Multiple central processing units (CPUs) comprise supercomputer architectures. These CPUs are organised into groups of compute nodes and memory. Supercomputers can have thousands of nodes that communicate with one another to solve problems using parallel processing.
Available data showed that as of this year, China has 173 of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, while the US owns 128. Although these two top countries account for roughly 60% of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the list of other top nations with the maximum number of supercomputers also includes Japan, France, Germany and Canada.
However, in terms of supercomputers, ESDS CTO Jadhav told News18 that with the advent of shared digital knowledge, it’s becoming feasible to design, develop and manufacture at-par systems in India.
The Ministry of Science & Technology announced in February this year that new supercomputers will be commissioned and installed in the coming year in institutes such as IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Patna, IIT Delhi, the Inter-University Accelerator Centre, the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics and the National Informatics Centre.
As of now, institutions like various C-DACs and IITs, as well as the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), have already installed supercomputing infrastructure under the National Supercomputing Mission.
India has three public supercomputers capable of ranking among the Top 500 that includes the Atos-built PARAM Siddhi-AI at C-DAC Pune, the HPE-built Pratyush and Mihir systems.
As stated by the ministry earlier this year, the design and development of indigenous server nodes, interconnect switches, storage technologies, and software stacks for High-Performance Computing or HPC are currently underway, with 85% indigenous manufacturing, implying that these technologies will be used in future supercomputers.
According to Jadhav, supercomputers are complex systems, however, their effectiveness depends on both quality hardware as well as software.
The expert said: “With the Trinetra HPC interconnect, it is possible to create a Torus network architecture in a switchless manner that avoids performance bottlenecks and enables systems to intercommunicate over a short distance.”
He also believes that such innovations in the network and computing side will enable India to compete in the supercomputers race against the US, China and other countries.
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