National Supercomputing Mission | UPSC
HEADLINES:
MoUs with premier academic institutions to boost manufacture & establishment of supercomputing infrastructure in India
WHY IN NEWS:
India set to achieve Self Reliance in Supercomputing with Manufacturing Critical Components in India
SYLLABUS COVERED: GS 3: Science and technology
LEARNING:
For PRELIMS it is important to go through the mission and objectives of NSM .
For MAINS can you mention few ways in which India be a Leader in Supercomputing technology ?
ISSUE:
NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTING MISSION
- Centre for Development of Advanced Computing(C-DAC) signed a total of 13 MoUs with the premier academic and R&D institutions of India.
- C-DAC is accelerating pace of research and innovation in manufacturing Critical Supercomputing components.
- Component will be manufactured in India, is a step towards Atmanirbhar Bharat .
- It was followed by Param Shakti and Param Brahma at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune, respectively.
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.
IASbhai WINDUP:
- The mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions to spread over the country.
- This will be done by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
- 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 to solve multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.
- Supercomputing is the key to so many areas like Computational Biology, Molecular Dynamics, National Security etc.
- Progress in this mission will break silos to empower people and make India future-ready and tackle future challenges.
SOURCES:THE HINDU & PIB | National Supercomputing Mission | UPSC

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