India’s supercomputing capabilities

Context

As per the global ranking service of super-computers (Top 500), India has only 3 top-ranked supercomputers among 500 and none in the top 100.

• The world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, offers a peak performance of 1,685 PFlops.

India’s steps towards supercomputer

• National Supercomputing Mission (NSM): Fifteen supercomputers, with an aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops, have been installed in the country since 2015 under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
• The National Supercomputing Mission (started in 2015) is intended to indigenise the development and manufacturing of powerful computers., with the National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone
• The mission is planned in three phases:
• Phase I Looks at assembling supercomputers
• Phase II looks at manufacturing certain components within the country
• Phase III where a supercomputer is designed by India
• A department of MeitY, C-DAC is responsible for designing, developing, and commissioning supercomputers under NSM.
  

Objectives

• 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 attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.

Supercomputer in India

• Mihir: Mihir (146th on the list), clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing power to match PARAM-Siddhi.
• PARAM-Siddhi:  It is the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, and has achieved a global ranking of 62 in the TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world.
• Pratyush: It is a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, ranked 78th on the November edition of the list.
• PARAM Shivay, -It is 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 respectively.

Application of Supercomputing

• Weather Forecasting
• Scientific Research
• Data Mining

Challenges of Supercomputing in India

• Lack of Research & Development in India.
• Lack of Funding.
• Limited manufacturing of electronics used in Supercomputing missions.