The first 70 supercomputers to be built in India by August 2017, to aid research said a government official said. Sites are being finalised by the government to construct a house for these supercomputers. On the Economic affairs, the Cabinet committee had approved the launch of National Supercomputing Mission in last year March with an estimated cost of Rs 4,500 crore for a period of seven years.
To enable India the Mission aimed to leapfrog to the league of world-class computing power nations on being implemented jointly by Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).
In the list of World`s 500 most powerful supercomputers, there are Eleven Indian Machines as of November 2015. At Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the first supercomputer is under development, which is responsible for the development of India`s first super computer ‘Param’.
“There are two major challenges in supercomputer revolution if supercomputers are to replace the common desktop computers. One is heat and power management as these supercomputers guzzle a lot of energy. Another is that we need to generate human resources to operate these supercomputers in the future,” said Ashutosh Sharma, secretary in the ministry of science and technology.
The supercomputer would have installed a grid with more than 70 high-performance computing facilities. There is a government program that connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high-speed network.
The focus this year is in manufacturing and hardware construction of this supercomputer. By the end of this mission, we will have the capability to make our own supercomputers and operate them,” said Sharma.
“But right now we are in negotiations with global vendors to manufacture supercomputers here and participate in human resource training,” he added.