National Supercomputer Mission (NSM) UPSC

National Supercomputer Mission (NSM)

India has produced just three supercomputers since 2015 —less than one a year on average — under the National Supercomputer Mission (NSM). The MeitY and DST handle the National Supercomputer Mission, and the mission’s nodal agencies are the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. 

What is National Supercomputer Mission (NSM) ? 

• 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 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. 

• The Mission also includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications. 

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

Objectives of National Supercomputer Mission (NSM) 

• 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 

Performance of National Supercomputer Mission (NSM) so far 

• NSM’s first supercomputer — PARAM Shivay installed in IIT-BHU, Varanasi. This supercomputer has 837 TeraFlop capacity. 

• The second supercomputer with a capacity of 1.66 PetaFlop was installed at IIT-Kharagpur. 

• The third system, PARAM Brahma is at IISER-Pune, has a capacity of 797 TeraFlop. 

• There will soon be 11 supercomputers; expected to be installed by 2020 or latest by March 2021.