New Delhi: The National Informatics Centre (NIC) is setting up an artificial intelligence data centre—the government’s first—at Shastri Park in the capital, ThePrint has learnt. With a capacity of 1.1 AI exaflops, the facility is expected to be ready this year. Purchase order for the equipment has already been placed. The centre will house 248 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and hold government data, a senior government official aware of the matter said.
The centre is being built even as NIC prepares to launch two projects—one database for Parliament, and another for legal records. The parliamentary database will be accessible only to Members of Parliament, while the legal one may be thrown open to the public, the official said. Both databases are set to be launched by next month, according to the official.An exaflop is a measure of computing speed. A flop is a single calculation, and an exaflop is a quintillion of them every second: a one followed by 18 zeroes. The ‘AI’ prefix is significant. Conventional supercomputers are rated on high-accuracy maths used for tasks, such as weather and climate modelling, whereas AI does not require that level of precision and relies on rougher, faster calculations, allowing the same hardware to crunch far more operations a second.
