India adds two more supercomputers to strengthen researches: Aims to deploy over 60 in next three years

India's HPC (high Performance Computing) initiative has finally gathered some much needed momentum as the country adds two more supercomputers to its growing computational repertoire. According to press reports, these new supercomputers are being deployed at IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Kharagpur and IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) Pune. 

This initiative comes as a part of  National Supercomputing Mission undertaken by India's Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The mission is currently in its first phase in which a series of six supercomputers are to be installed in education and research facilities across the nation. The first one, named "Param-Shivay", is already functional at IIT Varanasi and can churn up-to 837 Teraflops of data. By December this year, another three will be made available to IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, and Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies (JNIAS) which will conclude the first phase.

The second phase will start next year with plans to deliver at least 10 new supercomputer to further empower research and development in various field of science and technology. The mission , with a funding of ₹4,500 crore, targets to take the number beyond 60 by 2022.

Led by a team from C-DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing) and IISC (Indian Institute of Science) Bengaluru, these supercomputers have been designed and integrated in-house, using homegrown talents and technology. According to Milind Kulkarni, a senior scientist at DST, 3000 people with backgrounds ranging from physicshave been trained to

Unlike China, a country which has made great strides in developing supercomputers, manufacturing has never been India's strong suits which means for components like CPU, GPU, memories and interconnects, India still has to rely on foreign countries and companies. But with the recent government initiatives like "Make in India", the focus is now on minimizing such dependencies.

Ashutosh Sharma, secretary of DST, had to say this on the matter - “We may have missed the bus in micro-electronics, but our core strength lies in design and integration. These computers are all indigenously designed as part of ‘Make in India’. They are not only going to power our research in various domains, but would address several national security concerns."

A supercomputer can have thousands of CPUs and GPUs working in parallel 

Today when it comes to solve problems with huge data-sets, Supercomputers are some of the most powerful tools wielded by mankind. From complex weather simulations to avert natural disasters to folding proteins to find a cure for cancer, the importance of these behemoth clusters of high-performance parallel computing are only going to grow.

Despite emerging as an economical superpower, India's approach towards supercomputing has been less than optimal, a fact that reflects in the relatively lower rankings of the country's recent efforts. Hopefully, with the success of National Supercomputing Mission, that's going to change.