National supercomputing mission: third phase to begin by January 2021

On October 21, 2020, the Department of Science and Technology announced that the third phase of National Supercomputing Mission will start by January 2021. The third phase of the mission is to increase computing speed to around 45 petaflops.

Recent developments

On October 12, 2020 the C-DAC and the National Supercomputing Mission signed agreement with the leading institutes of India. According to the agreement, manufacturing units and assembly units of super computers are to be established in the Premier Institutes of the country. This is considered as a major step towards Atma nearby Bharat Abhiyan.

National Supercomputing Mission

The mission is being implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing C-DAC. It aims to empower the national academic Institutions and the research and development in the country to install supercomputing systems. The supercomputing grid is to be formed with more than 70 high performance computing facility. These supercomputers are to be networked under the National Knowledge network.

Under Phase 1 of the mission, the supercomputing speed of 6.6 petaflops was achieved. Under phase 2 of the mission, 8 more Institutions are to be equipped with supercomputing facilities by April 2021.  Under phase 2, the mission is to attain a speed of 10 petaflops.

Bottom line all the three phases will provide high-speed high-performance computing facilities to more than 75 institutions in India. This will act as a backbone to the academicians and researchers working through the National Knowledge network.

Background

Under the National Supercomputing Mission, the Param Shivay became the first supercomputer to be assembled indigenously. It was installed in IIT BHU.  Later the Param Shakti and Param Brahma super computers were installed in IIT Kharagpur and IISER Pune respectively.

Petaflop

The petaflop is a measure of processing speed of computers. It is expressed as thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

Way Forward

C DAC is also creating and installing an artificial intelligence super computing system that is capable of handling hundred petaflops of speed. Attained to increase the speed of computing related to artificial intelligence several time.

Month: Current Affairs - October, 2020