Under NSM, India to Get 14 New Supercomputers in 2020

Five years since launch, India is all set to experience the highest ever boost in its supercomputing capacities, with 14 new supercomputers set to be deployed this year.

These systems would be installed at various national-level research laboratories and academic institutions by end of 2020, stated Department of Science and Technology (DST) in an official statement issued on Friday. Of these, three systems would be installed within a month.

Once deployed, the total number of supercomputers under Rs 4,500 crore-National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) would grow to 17.

NSM is jointly led by DST and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Commissioned in May 2015, the nodal agencies spearheading the mission are Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc),Bengaluru. The NSM envisaged setting up a network of 70 high-performance computing facilities across academia and research institutes, by 2022.

Since the mission was approved until September 2019, only three systems — PARAM Shivay, PARAM Shakti and PARAM Bhrahma were deployed at IIT-BHU, IIT-Kharagpur and Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER),Pune, respectively.

” They are equipped with applications from domains like Weather and Climate, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bioinformatics, and Material science,” the DST stated.

In a report by The Indian Express report published on March 12, it was menioned that both the funding agencies had collectively released a sum to the tune of Rs 750.97 crore towards NSM, between May 2015 and September 2019.
Three systems, that are still gearing up for installation, were originally to be deployed before March 2020. But DST has now deferred the deployment by a month and it is expected to be completed prior to April 2020. These supercomputers will be made operational at IIT-Kanpur, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, and IIT-Hyderabad, DST said.

The major boost to the computing facility, is however, likely to be achieved towards the the end of 2020, when 11 new supercomputing systems will be made operational. Of these, eight systems, with collectively compute power of 16 PetaFlop, will be deployed at institutions located in India’s Northeastern region.

Three of the new systems, each having a compute power of 3PetaFlop, will be commissioned at IIT-Mumbai, IIT-Chennai and Inter University Accelatator Centre, Delhi. “These systems will form the backbone of the National Knowledge Network,” DST mentioned.

C-DAC’s Pune and Bengaluru centres are set to further enhance their computing capacities, by adding a 20 Petaflop system and a 100 PetaFlop Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system, each. Additionally, C-DAC will also have a 650 TeraFlop system, solely dedicated towards country’s StartUp and businesses under Medium and Small Scale Industries (MSMEs).

Source:IE

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