National Supercomputing Mission

In news

The second and final phase of National Computing Mission (NCM) will be over by September this year, making total computational capacity of India to 16 Petaflops.

About

NCM was launched in 2015 in a 4500 crore project led jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Department of Science and Technology.

The main aim of the mission is to create a powerful potential for the country and offer powerful computational facilities to enhance research. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) were endowed to head the seven-year mission, ending in 2022.

A National Knowledge Network (NKN), a grid, will connect 70 supercomputers covering 75 research institutions with over a thousand researchers using this facility.

Last year in October, 2020, CDAC signed MOUs with 10 IITs- Madras, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Roorkee, Mandi, Gandhinagar, Goa, Palakkad along with IISc, National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute and NIT, Thiruchirapalli. A High Power Computing (HPC), is installed in every institute mentioned above.

Hitherto, over 4,500 people have been trained in HPC and more training in Artificial Intelligence will be taken at special NSM nodal centres set at four IITs — Kharagpur, Madras, Goa and Palakkad.

PARAM Shivay, PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti and PARAM Sanganak were installed at IIT (BHU), IIT Kharagpur, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Research in the first phase of the mission.