As part of India’s ambitious National SuperComputing (NSM) mission, nine more supercomputers will be commissioned and installed in top institutes of the country in the coming days such as at the IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Patna, IIT Delhi, IUAC (Inter-University Accelerator Centre) Delhi, CDAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) – Pune, SNBNCBS (S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences), NCRA (National Centre for Radio Astrophysics) Pune, and NIC (National Informatics Centre) Delhi.
The National Supercomputing Mission 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, a Science and Technology ministry note stated here.
The NSM is also, the ministry note further stated, setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic and research institutions across the country. Part of this is being imported from abroad, and partly built indigenously, the latter being increased with time. The mission is being jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) 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, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, NABI Mohali, CDAC Bengaluru respectively.
PARAM Siddhi- AI, the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, has achieved a global ranking of 62 in the TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world, released on 16th November 2020.
The NSM mission has also created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 11,000 HPC (High-Performance Computing) aware manpower and faculties. To expand the activities of the HPC training, four NSM Nodal Centres for training in HPC and AI have been established at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Goa, and IIT Palakkad. These centres have also conducted online training programs in HPC, AI, and other areas, according to the government note.