India To Get 11 More C-DAC-Powered Supercomputers By 2022

It looks like India will have its own line of supercomputers by 2022. According to the latest report, the Government of India has approved to begin the second phase of the National Supercomputing Mission with plans to set up 73 supercomputers across the country.

The National Supercomputing Mission or NSM is a government body under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Department of Science and Technology, located in Pune and Bengaluru.

NSM is capable of designing and developing computers that are capable of doing high-fidelity tasks, weather forecasts, and quick information analysis related to national security.

According to Milind Kulkarni -- head of the NSM, supercomputers that are currently operational in India consists of 60 percent indigenous parts with motherboards developed by Intel. In the next phase, the institution will develop 11 more computers of this kind with processors from C-DAC and these computers will be capable of operating at 10 petaflops. In simpler words, these computers can do 10^15 floating-point operations per second.

Just like the first phase, all eleven supercomputers from the second phase will be installed at various IITs and IIScs. As of now, processors from C-DAC are currently under testing and this partnership is expected to reduce the cost of supercomputer manufacturing by 10 percent. Though there is no information on the exact cost of a supercomputer, NSM has an annual budget of 4,500 crores.

In the first phase, NSM the required parts to build a supercomputer were acquired from different countries and assembled in India. The first-ever supercomputers assembled by NSM was called the Param Shivay and it is currently located at IIT Bhuvaneshwar. On a similar line, two more supercomputers named Param Shakti and Param Brahma, are currently situated at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune.

NSM has also confirmed that it will deploy three more super comps by 2020, and these computers will be located at IIT-Kanpur, JN Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, and IIT-Hyderabad.

Via