Context

After a delay of more than three years, India, awarded French technology firm Atos a ?4,500-crore contract to build 70 supercomputers under the National Supercomputing Mission.

About

• The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
• These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the 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. Academic and R&D institutions as well as key user departments/ministries would participate by using these facilities and develop applications of national relevance.
• The Mission also includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications.

Objective:

• To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
• To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains
• To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing
• To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology

Implementing agencies

The Mission would be implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) at an estimated cost of Rs.4500 crore over a period of seven years.

Application areas:

• Climate Modelling
• Weather Prediction
• Aerospace Engineering including CFD, CSM, CEM
• Computational Biology
• Molecular Dynamics
• Atomic Energy Simulations
• National Security/ Defence Applications
• Seismic Analysis
• Disaster Simulations and Management
• Computational Chemistry
• Computational Material Science and Nano-materials
• Discoveries beyond Earth (Astrophysics)
• Large Complex Systems Simulations and Cyber Physical Systems
• Big Data Analytics
• Finance
• Information repositories/ Government Information Systems