A first of its kind attempt to boost the country’s computing power, the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is steered jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.

Background

World-wide supercomputing facilities have enabled countries in their science and technology capabilities in areas such as designing vehicles, aeroplanes, massive structures like high rise buildings and bridges, infrastructure, discovery of new life saving drugs, discovery and extraction of new energy sources including oil, natural gas, etc. 

Over the years, supercomputers have helped researchers in several ways. Weather prediction has reached accuracy of forecast as well as real time tracking of natural phenomenon. Timely warning of cyclones in the recent past have saved many lives and property. 

Param Shivay — designed and built under NSM by C-DAC at IIT (BHU), Varanasi was dedicated by PM Narendra Modi to the nation in February 2019. 

Similar systems Param Shakti and Param Brahma were installed at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune. They are equipped with applications from domains like weather, computational fluid dynamics, bioinformatics and material science.

What is the significance of NSM?

In 2015, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the launch of the National Supercomputing Mission at an estimated cost of Rs 4,500 crore over a period of seven years. 

The mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising more than 70 high-performance computing facilities. These supercomputers will also be networked on the national supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN). 

The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network. 

Academic and R&D institutions as well as key user departments/ministries would participate by using these facilities and develop applications of national relevance. 

The mission implementation would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large scientific and technology community in the country and enable the country with a capacity of solving multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.

Objectives of NSM:

*To make India one of the world leaders in supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance.

*To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains.

*To minimise redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimise investments in supercomputing.

*To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.

Roadmap for NSM

The target of the mission was set to establish a network of supercomputers of  hundreds of teraFLOPS (TF) and three systems with greater than or equal to 3 petaFLOPS (PF) in academic and research institutions of National importance across the country by 2022. 

This network of supercomputers envisaging a total of 15-20 PF was approved in 2015 and was later revised to a total of 45 PF (45,000 TFs), within the same cost and capable of solving large and complex computational problems. 

Plans are afoot to install three more supercomputers by April 2020, one each at IIT-Kanpur, JN Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, and IIT-Hyderabad. This will ramp up the supercomputing facility to 6 PF.

11 new systems are likely to be set up in different IITs, NITs, National Labs, and IISERs across India by December this year, which will have many sub-systems manufactured and microprocessors designed in India which will bring in a cumulative capacity of 10.4 PF.

Spreading out the reach to the northeast region, eight systems with a total power of 16 PF are being commissioned. 

NSM is moving fast not only towards creating a computer infrastructure for the country but also to develop the next generation of supercomputer experts.

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