The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has joined hands with US-based chip designer NVIDIA to set up a Centre of Excellence at Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute (CEERI) in New Delhi. This centre will house India’s first ever supercomputer.

According to a newswire, the CEERI-Nvidia Centre of Excellence (CNCoE) will house a five-petaflop AI supercomputer — India’s first industrial AI supercomputer. It is made up of five NVIDIA DGX-1 workstations.

Each one of these workstations costs a whopping $129,000.

Vishal Dhupar, managing director, Nvidia South Asia, shared on social media, “Happy to have signed an MoU that brings together @CSIRCEERI and @nvidia to set up CEERI-NVIDIA CoE, that will combine cutting-edge reach in India with our AI compute power (sic).”

“This CNCoE is significant because it brings together NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI platform with vast industrial scientific research expertise and capability from CSIR-CEERI… This combination will enable researchers and industry across the country to advance their AI systems development,” he said.

The centre will offer the industry a complete design and implementation environment for the development of artificial intelligence-based products and applications.

NVIDIA India shared on their official Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/NVIDIA.IN/photos/a.403271346710084.1073741828.395597700810782/611951529175397/?type=3&theater

CNCoE will provide a platform to create solutions for some of the most important problems faced in India. Santanu Chaudhury, director at CSIR-CEERI added that the facility had the potential to evoke a new culture of AI-based cutting-edge innovations in a variety of domains.

“Healthcare, natural resource management, food production, security and transportation are some of the areas that can be helped by exploiting multi-dimensional knowledge base available with CSIR and other research organisations in the country,” he added.