11 Supercomputers to be set up inIITs, NITs, National Labs, IISERs by Dec 2020

2020-21 is an important year for the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) of India. The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increased computational needs of academia, researchers, MSMEs and startups by creating the design, manufacturing capabilities of supercomputers native to India.

A first attempt of its kind to increase the computing power of the country, the National Super Computing Mission is jointly led by the Department of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and conducted by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

The goal of the mission was to establish a network of supercomputers ranging from a few Tera Flops (TF) to hundreds of Tera Flops (TF) and three systems with more than or equal to 3 Peta Flops (PF) in academic and research institutions of national interest across the country by 2022. This network of supercomputers with a total of 15-20 PF was approved in 2015 and later revised to a total of 45 PF (45000 TF & # 39; s), a jump of 6 times more computing power within the same cost and able to solve large and complex computing problems.

With the revised plan, the first domestically assembled supercomputer, called Param Shivay, was installed in IIT (BHU) and was inaugurated by the Prime Minister. Similar systems Param Shakti and Param Brahma are installed at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune. They are equipped with applications from domains such as weather and climate, computational fluid dynamics, bioinformatics and materials science.

There are plans to install three more supercomputers by April 2020, one each at IIT-Kanpur, JN Center for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru and IIT-Hyderabad. This will boost the supercomputer facility to 6 PF.

In December this year, 11 new systems are expected to be set up in various IITs, NITs, National Laboratories and IISERs across India, where many subsystems will be manufactured in India and microprocessors are designed with a cumulative capacity of 10.4 petaflops.

8 systems with a total computing power of 16 PF are deployed to spread the range to the northeastern region of the country. In the IIT-Mumbai, IIT-Chennai and the Interuniversity Accelerator Center (IUAC) in Delhi, five native systems with three computing power of three PF are being installed, with NKN as the backbone. It also includes a native built 20 PF system at C-DAC, Pune and a 100 PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system. A mid-level 650 TFs system will also be installed at C-DAC Bengaluru to advise start-ups, SSIs and MSMEs.

Aimed to provide Supercomputing facilities to approximately 60-70 institutions nationwide and more than thousands of active researchers, academics, etc., NSM has gained momentum and is moving not only toward creating a computing infrastructure country, but also increasing capacity build the land to develop the next generation of supercomputer experts.

(With inputs from PIB)

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