AI Infrastructure at the Department of AI, IIT Hyderabad

As the Department of Artificial Intelligence at IIT Hyderabad continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the department has recently procured new state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure. This includes an AI center, funded by the support of Honeywell and the Japan International Cooperation Agency, consisting of various GPU- based servers for carrying out cutting-edge research. In addition, the department also recently entered into close collaboration with NVIDIA to establish an NVIDIA Artificial Intelligence Technology Centre (NVAITC), the first of its kind in India.

The newly established AI center consists of computing facilities such as NVIDIA DGX-1s and DGX-2s, which are widely reputed AI supercomputers. The DGX-1 comprises 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and provides GPU computing power of 1 PetaFLOPS. On the other hand, DGX-2 is the world’s first 2 PetaFLOPS system integrating 16 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, enabling one to work with large training datasets. This center would focus on accelerating research in AI at the institute. For reference visit Nvidia DGX

India's first NVAITC, a center of collaboration between researchers at IIT-Hyderabad and NVIDIA, was inaugurated on 9th July 2020. The institute has already procured three NVIDIA DGX-1TM systems and two NVIDIA DGX-2TM systems and would soon procure more such servers. The establishment of the center has led researchers to pursue research projects of importance to societal needs. Research and projects related to agriculture in AI, smart cities, intelligent transport, and Indian language understanding are underway, and have already led to the publication of some jointly authored papers. Projects that will be taken up soon include increasing crop yield using AI algorithms and applying AI-based solutions to support safer transportation systems and better ways of managing traffic, among others.