NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTING MISSION
Context
The second phase of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) will be completed by September 2021, taking India’s total computational capacity to 16 Petaflops.
More about Mission
The National Supercomputing Mission was launched to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone.
The NSM is setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic and research institutions across the country. Part of this is being imported from abroad and part built indigenously.
The mission jointly steered by Ministry of Electronics and IT and Department of Science & Technology, is being implemented through two leading organizations – Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc),
Bangalore with an objective to meet the increasing computing demands of the scientific and research community.
Computing infrastructure has already been installed in four premier institutions and installation work is in rapid progress in 9 more. Completion in of Phase II of NSM in September 2021 will take the country’s computing power to 16 Petaflops (PF).
MoUs have been signed with a total of 14 premier institutions of India for establishing Supercomputing Infrastructure with Assembly and Manufacturing in India. These include IITs, NITs, National Labs, and IISERs.
PETAFLOP
A petaflop is one thousand trillion, or one quadrillion, operations per second, and represents an extremely fast computing speed for a single machine.
“Flop” stands for floating-point operations per second.
In terms of today’s practical computing speed, the petaflop can also be thought of as one million gigaflops, where the gigaflop represents 1 billion floating-point operations per second.
PARAM Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur respectively.
The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 4500 High-Performance Computing (HPC) aware manpower and faculties