Computing infrastructure of India is less than 2% of global capacity, NVIDIA Asia South MD

A senior official of the GPU chip maker NVIDIA said that the computing infrastructure of India is less than two percent of global capacity which is a limiting factor in its contribution to research that remains in the range of two percent.

At StartUP Mahakumbh, NVIDIA’s Asia South MD, Vishal Dhupar said it is because of the availability of computing infrastructure, the contribution of research from Indians abroad is around 12 percent.

"India, today, is approximately sub-2 percent as compared to the US and China combined is closer to 58-59 percent. If you go back and figure out why the research in India is as low as what it is, we are talking about India's contribution of 2 percent. There is a direct correlation to that. Indians who basically contribute to the research bit are not based in India are contributing 12 percent because infrastructure is available there," Dhupar said.

The GPU-based servers or accelerated computing demand has increased because they can process data at a higher speed compared to CPU-based servers.

The race for AI development among global companies has led to a shortage of GPUs.

NVIDIA rules the GPU market with about 88 percent share and due to high demand globally there is a lag of 12-18 months in getting GPUs from the company, as per industry estimates.

In order to encourage AI development in the country, the government has approved the India AI Mission with an outlay of Rs 10,372 crore for five years.

Under the mission, supercomputing capacity, comprising over 10,000 GPUs (graphics processing units), will be made available to various stakeholders for creating an AI ecosystem.

"For researchers, you need infrastructure-the tool on which research happens and that is something which is in progress. Of course, we are very excited about what the government has announced. That is a great start," Dhupar said.

Reliance, Tata, Yotta, Netweb and some of the other Indian companies have collaborated with NVIDIA to build and install GPU-based servers in India.

"If we can build accelerated computing infrastructure quickly and fast, research will happen and more importantly, you will add $1 trillion to the economy," Dhupar said.