DDN and Council of Scientific Industrial Research – Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute in Partnership

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced a collaboration with Council of Scientific Industrial Research – Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute (CSIR-CEERI), focused on an objective to design, test and execute computation and storage solutions that will enable AI, machine learning, and deep learning workloads.

The collaboration will provide a complete infrastructure solution that can deliver AI as a Service (AIaaS) for CSIR-CEERI customers.

“We looked at high performance storage solution providers for artificial intelligence and deep learning and found that DDN Storage offers unified storage for AI as well as HPC with extreme performance in a very small data center footprint,” said CSIR-CEERI director, professor Santanu Chaudhury. “With CSIR-CEERI’s mission to collaborate with industry for innovative product development, we are pleased to align with storage industry leader DDN to offer a combined AI computing and fast storage environment to researchers and the AI developer community in India.“

CSIR-CEERI is a laboratory that conducts R&D in the field of electronics in India. By coupling CSIR-CEERI’s expertise in computing infrastructure with DDN’s industry at-scale storage solutions, the two will provide solutions with the potential of unbridled performance and accessibility. The collaboration will also work towards producing joint research, solution blueprints, and AI and deep learning IPs related to accelerating performance through data accessibility to computation clusters.

“DDN is known for its ability to provide the most scalable solutions for customers who do not want to sacrifice performance or efficiency. Collaborating with an extraordinary partner such as CSIR-CEERI enables us to deliver the new and innovative solutions that customers expect from us. Bringing Artificial Intelligence as a Service to organizations will allow us, as a society, to continue to push the envelope in artificial learning and deep learning advancements and to make significant breakthroughs in research and discovery,” said Atul Vidwansa, country manager for India, DDN.

Leveraging NVIDIA DGX-1 servers, the India-based Naraina Center at CSIR-CEERI computing facility will be used for the development, testing and hosting of the solution offering. This facility will provide an environment to support demanding workloads executed by CSIR’s laboratories, mutual partners and end users.  The DGX-1 systems will fuel a cluster that has the computational power of 5 petaflops, and when combined with DDN’s AI storage solutions provide a complete AI, learning and inferencing infrastructure solution. 

The AIaaS solutions are expected to become available in India starting January 2019.