India is quickly growing as a leader in the high power computer processing arena with the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) and so far the supercomputing infrastructure established in 10 leading institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) Bengaluru, along with different C-DACs, National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI) Mohali and helping researchers from different other organizations as well. The last stage of the fabrication work is being completed in five additional organizations.
The establishment of supercomputing infrastructures in institutions will not only assist in meeting the ever-increasing computational needs of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood forecast as well as in genomics, and drug discovery, but will additionally firm up the native capabilities of developing supercomputers.
As a component of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru has introduced Param Pravega, one of the most capable Indian supercomputers. Param Pravega, with a computing frequency of 3.3 petaflops, is the biggest supercomputer to be installed in any Indian academic institution.
Moving ahead, the design and building of the native server nodes, interconnecting switch, storage, and system software stack for the next generation of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems have been started with around 85 per cent of the native production process. This incorporates India’s first indigenously built server platform called ‘Rudra’, which can meet the HPC needs of all governments and Public Sector Units as well as the strategic needs of the nation.
Other than that, a high-performance computing interconnect called “Trinetra”, which corresponds to the next generation of systems, has also been planned and developed indigenously in the country for efficient inter-node communication between the compute nodes. This will further assist in boosting the power efficiency and will also support large-scale systems.
The National Supercomputing Mission was set in motion to boost the research potential and the competence in the country by connecting them to create a supercomputing matrix, with the National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone of the system. The National Supercomputing Mission is additionally setting up a grid of supercomputing provisions in academic and research establishments throughout the nation.
A part of the system is being brought in from abroad, while the rest of the part is being constructed natively, in which the indigenous construction is being elevated with time. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is jointly overseeing and guiding the mission and while the execution part is being undertaken by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
The first supercomputer PARAM Shivay was assembled natively and had been installed at IIT (BHU). It was later on accompanied by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, NABI Mohali, CDAC Bengaluru respectively.
Indian stride on the way to the influential position in supercomputing found a new aspect with the confluence of High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI). A 200 AI PF Artificial Intelligence supercomputing system created and installed in C-DAC can work on extremely large-scale artificial intelligence workloads, thus elevating the artificial intelligence-related computing speeds to AI multiple times. PARAM Siddhi has earned the sixty-two worldwide position in the list of TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world.
Additional to that, the National Supercomputing Mission, with proper training has created more than 11,000 supercomputer experts and faculties of the next generation for High-Performance Computing manpower requirements. To further grow the impact of the HPC training, four NSM Nodal Centers have been established at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Goa, and IIT Palakkad, for the training in HPC and AI. These centers also conduct online training programs in HPC, AI, and other similar areas of interest.
The very next year, 9 more supercomputers are planned to be authorized and installed in premier institutes like the IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Patna, IIT Delhi, IUAC Delhi, CDAC-Pune, SNBNCBS, NCRA Pune, and NIC Delhi. The National Supercomputing Mission aims to provide access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) proficiency to over 100 academic establishments and more than thousands of active researchers, academicians working through the Nation Knowledge Network (NKN), which acts as the backbone for the supercomputing systems.
