National Super Computing Mission (NSM)

CONTEXT:

• India is fast emerging a leader in high power computing with the National Super Computing Mission (NSM).

KEY DETAILS:

• India is fast emerging a leader in high power computing with the National Super Computing Mission (NSM) boosting it to meet the increasing computational demands of

  • Academia,

  • Researchers,

  • MSMES, and

  • Startups

• Areas of Work: In areas like

  • Oil exploration,

  • Flood prediction as well as

  • Genomics and drug discovery.

• Computing infrastructure in institutions:  It has already been installed in four premier institutions and installation work is in rapid progress in 9 more.

NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTING MISSION:

• It 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 is being jointly steered by

  • Department of Science and Technology (DST) and

  • Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

• Implemented by:

  • Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and

  • Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

• Phase II of NSM: Completion in September 2021 will take the country’s computing power to 16 Petaflops (PF).

• Phase III: Initiated in year 2021, will take the computing speed to around 45 Petaflops. This will include three systems of 3 PF each and one system of 20PF as a national facility.

Indigenous supercomputer in India:

• 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.

• PARAM Siddhi - AI, the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, has achieved global ranking of 62 in TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world, released on 16th November 2020.

• Rudra: India has developed an Indigenous server (Rudra), which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs.

SOURCE: PIB