Indian Govt. to unveil Rs 4,500 cr National Supercomputing Mission by year end


By MYBRANDBOOK


Indian Govt. to unveil Rs 4,500 cr National Supercomputing Mission by year end



The Indian government has approved a seven-year National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) supercomputing program at an estimated cost of about $700 million (₹4,500-crore). This will comprise of a supercomputing grid of 70 geographically-distributed high-performance computing centers linked over a high-speed network.

 

According to a report, the first phase of the NSM is focused on assembling the supercomputers while the build element will be part of the second phase. If all goes well, IIT-Kharagpur will have a 1.3 petaflop machine and IISER Pune and IIT-BHU will have a 650 teraflop computer each by the year-end.

 

As per the initial plan, while some components would be imported, some like server-board assemblies, cooling solutions, power supply and storage systems would be manufactured in India with an aim to make 50% of the components locally over time.

 

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is evaluating the technical bids by firms such as Acer, Fujitsu, IBM, HCL, TCS, Dell and Netweb and the contract is likely to be awarded soon.

 

India's supercomputer program was started in late 1980s because Cray supercomputers could not be imported into India due to an arms embargo imposed on India, as it was a dual-use technology and could be used for developing nuclear weapons.

 

Due to this technology-denial move, India set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in March 1988 with the clear mandate to develop an indigenous supercomputer to meet high-speed computational needs in solving scientific and other developmental problems where fast number crunching is a major component.

 

In the late 80s the PARAM 8000 had been considered to be India’s “first supercomputer”. Then came Aaditya from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Mumbai. This was followed by the supercomputer SahasraT from the Indian Institute of Science – Bangalore (IISc.) in 2015. It was an independent effort from SERC who was spear-headed by Professor N Balakrishnan and his team.

 

Three years ago, NSM had announced to place India higher in the global supercomputer rankings. None of the government sources would make any concrete announcements about the progress and it was rumoured that Param series was a dying breed of supercomputers and there was nothing on the Indian high performance computing (HPC) horizon to replace it. In January however, the Pratyush, a 10-petaflop machine was announced where a key function of the machine’s computing power would be monsoon forecasting using a dynamic model.

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