What is National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)?
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.
- The mission will nationally coordinate collaborative programme involving developers and users of supercomputing systems as well as academic and research institutions.
- It looks to facilitate effective governance and monitoring mechanisms to build culture of supercomputing for solving complex R&D problems and designing solutions addressing various country specific requirements for scientific, strategic and societal applications.
- The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of 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 a central government initiative which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network.
- Under NSM, the long-term plan is to build a strong base of 20,000 skilled persons. PARAM Shavak is one such machine that has been deployed to provide training.
- The mission will be implemented by the Department of Science and Technology (Ministry of Science and Technology) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), through the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
Target of the mission:
The target of the mission was set to establish a network of supercomputers ranging from a few Tera Flops (TF) to Hundreds of Tera Flops (TF) and three systems with greater than or equal to 3 Peta Flops (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 (45000 TFs), a jump of 6 times more compute power within the same cost and capable of solving large and complex computational problems.
Supercomputers in India
- PARAM 8000, considered to be India’s first supercomputer was indigenously built in 1991 by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
- Presently, Pratyush, a Cray XC40 system – an array of computers that can deliver a peak power of 6.8 petaflops, installed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, is the fastest supercomputer in India. Launched in January 2018, it is the fourth fastest High Performance Computer (HPC) dedicated to climate modelling in the world.
Supercomputing Application Areas
- Climate Modelling.
- Weather Prediction.
- Aerospace Engineering including CFD, CSM, CEM.
- Computational Biology.
- Molecular Dynamics.
- Atomic Energy Simulations.
- National Security/Defence Applications.
- Seismic Analysis.
- Disaster Simulations and Management.
- Computational Chemistry.
- Computational Material Science and Nanomaterials.
- Discoveries beyond Earth (Astrophysics).
- Large Complex Systems Simulations and Cyber Physical Systems.
- Big Data Analytics.
- Finance.
- Information repositories/Government Information Systems.
