National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) | UPSC

MISSION

• The Mission is to Establish Dependable and Secure Exa-Scale Eco-system with innovative designs, disruptive technologies and Expert Human resource.
• The Mission envisages empowering academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.

• 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 .
• The Mission implementation would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large Scientific & Technology community in the country.
• This will enable the country with a capacity of solving multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.

FOCUS AREAS

• The goal is to develop own indigenous hardware encompassing exascale chip design.

• Exascale interconnects and storage including silicon-photonics at C-DAC to achieve complete self-reliance.

IMPLEMENTATION

The Mission would be implemented and steered jointly by:

• The Department of Science and Technology (DST)
• Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY)

INFRASTRUCTURE PHASES

• NSM Phase-I : It is already installed and much of Phase-II in place, the network of supercomputers through the country will soon reach to around 16 Petaflops (PF).
• NSM Phase-III : It is to be initiated in January 2021, will take the computing speed to around 45 Petaflops.

TIMELINE AND FUNDING

OBJECTIVE

• To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing.
• To enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance.

• To 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.

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 Nanomaterials
• Discoveries beyond Earth (Astrophysics)
• Large Complex Systems Simulations and Cyber Physical Systems
• Big Data Analytics
• Finance
• Information repositories/ Government Information Systems.

INDIGENOUS CAPABILITY

• India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with the industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability.
• While in Phase-I, 30 percent value addition is done in India, that has been scaled up to 40 percent in Phase-II.
• Efforts are being made to develop parts like server board, interconnect, processor, system software libraries, storage, and HPC-AI converged accelerator domestically.

• This is the first time that a server system was made in India, along with the full software stack developed by C-DAC.