National Super Computing Mission (NSM)

In context

India is fast emerging as a leader in high power computing with the National Super Computing Mission (NSM).

National Supercomputing Mission

• It was launched in 2015 to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone.
• The NSM is setting up a grid of supercomputing facilities in academic and research institutions across the country.
  • Part of this is being imported from abroad and partly built indigenously.
• The Mission is being jointly implemented by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
• 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.

Achievements

• The mission is meeting the increased computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics and drug discovery.
• The mission has created the next generation of supercomputer experts by training more than 4500 HPC aware manpower and faculties.
• Powered by the NSM, India’s network of research institutions, in collaboration with the industry, is scaling up the technology and manufacturing capability to make more and more parts in India.
  • While in Phase I, 30 per cent value addition is done in India that has been scaled up to 40 per cent in Phase II.
  • Completion of Phase II of NSM in September 2021 will take the country’s computing power to 16 Petaflops (PF).
  • Phase III, initiated this year, will take the computing speed to around 45 Petaflops.
    • This will include three systems of 3 PF each and one system of 20PF as a national facility.
  • The three phases will provide access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facilities to around 75 institutions and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through Nation Knowledge Network (NKN) – the backbone for supercomputing systems.
• India has developed an Indigenous server (Rudra), which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs.
• MoUs have been signed with a total of 14 premier institutions of India for establishing Supercomputing Infrastructure with Assembly and Manufacturing in India.

Source :PIB