High Performance Computer System for MSMEs: Param Utkarsh

The Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) in India has made an appeal to encourage businesses in this sector to utilize the High-Performance Computing System (HPC) PARAM Utkarsh. This system, established by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) as part of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), is designed to support research and development activities in the fields of IT, electronics and related areas.

PARAM Utkarsh is equipped with a range of cutting-edge features including Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities over machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) frameworks, cloud based computing and storage services, big data cluster services, secured infrastructure, high stability and reliability, application enablement and user support and training.

For pricing, MSMEs can avail the HPC services at Rs 42 per GPU card per hour and Rs 0.96 per CPU core per hour. Additionally 100 GB of storage is provided free of charge per account each month with an additional cost of Rs 1 per GB beyond that allocation. Billing cycles can be chosen as monthly, quarterly or annually. Importantly;  the system is accessible to both commercial users and academic and research institutions.

Recognizing the importance of MSMEs as the backbone of the Indian economy the NSM project aims to facilitate their adoption of HPC technology. MSMEs often face challenges in embracing HPC due to limited in house expertise, restricted access to hardware, and resource constraints for such a transformative endeavor. PARAM Utkarsh, under NSM seeks to bridge this gap by providing a platform for MSMEs to explore HPC’s potential in improving product quality, reducing delivery times and fostering innovation.

This high-performance computing system, PARAM Utkarsh, is built on an Intel Cascade Lake processor and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU featuring a 100Gbps infiniband non-blocking interconnect. It boasts over 50,000 compute cores (CPU and GPU), incorporates a liquid cooling system for energy efficiency (PUE), and delivers a peak computing power of 838 Teraflops. This initiative aims to empower MSMEs in India by harnessing the capabilities of advanced computing technology to drive growth and innovation.