The Ministry of Science & Technology (MoS&T) has announced the commissioning and installation of 9 more supercomputers across various institutions in the upcoming year. 

As per the ministry, the step will not only meet the increased computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics, and drug discovery, but also firm up the indigenous capability of developing supercomputers.

These nine supercomputers will be installed at IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Patna, IIT Delhi, IUAC Delhi, CDAC-Pune, SNBNCBS, NCRA Pune, and NIC Delhi. 

“India is fast evolving as a frontrunner in high power computing with the National Super Computing Mission (NSM) with Supercomputing infrastructure already installed in 10 premier institutions like IITs, IISc, IISER Pune, JNCASR Bengaluru, various C-DACs, NABI Mohali, and benefitting researchers from several other institutions too,” the ministry said in its statement.

NSM’s relevance

The National Supercomputing Mission was launched to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country. To that end,

• The NSM is setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic and research institutions across the country with the National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone. 
• The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 11,000 HPC aware manpower and faculties. To expand the activities of the HPC training, four NSM Nodal Centres for training in HPC and AI have been established at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Goa, and IIT Palakkad. These centres have also conducted online training programs in HPC, AI, and other areas.
• Powered by the NSM, India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with the industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability to make more and more parts in India, taking indigenous manufacturing to 85%.

Earlier, 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, IIT Hyderabad, NABI Mohali, CDAC Bengaluru respectively.