National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

2020 APR 14

Mains   > Science and Technology   >   IT & Computers   >   IT & Computers

Why in news?

India will get 14 new supercomputers under the National Supercomputing Mission by 2020.

Major boost to Supercomputing

  • By the deployment of 14 more supercomputers the total number of supercomputers would grow to 17 under Rs 4,500 crore-National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
  • These systems would be installed at various national-level research laboratories and academic institutions by end of 2020.
  • Since the launch of the mission only three systems PARAM Shivay, PARAM Shakti and PARAM Bhrahma were deployed at IIT-BHU, IIT-Kharagpur and Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER),Pune, respectively.

  • They are equipped with applications from domains like Weather and Climate, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bioinformatics and Material science.

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

  • The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was commissioned in May 2015, jointly led by Department of Science and Technology and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
  • The nodal agencies spearheading the mission are Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bengaluru.
  • The NSM envisaged setting up a network of 70 high-performance computing facilities across academia and research institutes by 2022.
  • Setting up of supercomputing centers of different sizes and scales to match demands of High Performance Computers (HPC) users – build and buy approach.
  • Man-power development for high performance computing.

Common benefits of supercomputers and NSM include:

  • Supercomputers can be used for testing mathematical models for complex physical phenomena or designs, such as climate and weather, evolution of the cosmos etc.
  • They are used in the field of nuclear research and reactors, in pharmacology and cryptology.
  • Supercomputers have found wide application in areas involving engineering or scientific research, like in the studies of the structure of subatomic particles and of the origin of universe.
  • As the cost of supercomputing is declining, more businesses are using supercomputers for market research and other business-related models.
  • Significant qualitative and quantitative improvement in research and development can be expected under NSM.
  • NSM can lay solid foundations for supercomputing ecosystem which can help in scientific breakthroughs.

Analysis

  • India has produced just three supercomputers since 2015, less than one a year on average under the National Supercomputer Mission (NSM).
  • The delay in the initial period of the mission may due to the lack of technology and initially the servers and networks were to be built.
  • Among the supercomputing systems eight systems with collectively compute power of 16 PetaFlop will be deployed at institutions located in North-Eastern region.
  • C-DAC will have a 650 TeraFlop system solely dedicated towards country’s StartUp and businesses under Medium and Small Scale Industries (MSMEs).
  • Supercomputers networked under NSM will be the backbone of National Knowledge Network (NKN). The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high-speed network.  
  • Globally China continues to lead the supercomputer race. Its total number of supercomputers is 227, followed by the US (119 supercomputers). Other countries in this league are Japan (29), France (18) and Germany (16).