Third phase of National Supercomputing Mission to start in Jan 2021

PTI, Oct 21, 2020, 8:32 PM IST

New Delhi: The third phase of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) will kickstart in January, taking computing speed to around 45 petaflops, the Department of Science and Technology said on Wednesday.

The NSM is rapidly boosting high power computing in the country through its various phases to meet the increased computational demands of academia, researchers, medium, small and micro enterprises and start-ups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as also genomics, and drug discovery.

The Rs 4,500 crore-National Supercomputers Mission (NSM) envisages nearly 50 supercomputers across the country in three phases. As the infrastructure planned in NSM phase I has already been installed and much of Phase II is in place, the speed of supercomputers in the country will soon reach to around 16 PF, the DST said.

“Phase III, to be initiated in January 2021, (it) will take the computing speed to around 45 petaflops,” the DST said.

The NSM is jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

Param Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by Param Shakti and Param Brahma at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune, respectively, the DST said.

“Thereafter, supercomputing facilities were set up in two more institutions, and one is being set up under Phase I, ramping up high power computing speed to 6.6 PF. In Phase II, eight more institutions will be equipped with supercomputing facilities by April 2021, with a total of 10 PF compute capacity. MoUs have been signed with a total of 14 premier institutions of India for establishing supercomputing infrastructure with assembly and manufacturing in India,” the statement added.

These include IITs, NITs, national labs, and Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs).

Some of the supercomputers have already been installed, and some more will be done by December this year. The Phase II installations will be completed by April 2021.

The three phases will provide access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities to around 75 institutions and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through Nation Knowledge Network (NKN), the backbone for supercomputing systems.

HPC and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have converged together. A 100 AI PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system is being created and installed in C-DAC, which can handle incredibly large-scale AI workloads, increasing the speed of computing-related to AI several times.

The mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 2,400 supercomputing manpower and faculties till date.