India to Build 60 Supercomputers

The Department of Science and Technology has announced the plans to build 60 supercomputers over the next three years.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will be responsible for the implementation of the project and six machines are expected to be installed by the end of the year.

Supercomputers

A supercomputer is one that performs at or near the highest operational rate for computers.  Supercomputers are generally reserved for scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of computation (or both).

The computing Performance of a supercomputer is measured in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second. The supercomputer essentially consists of tens of thousands of processors which can perform billions and trillions of calculations per second. Hence supercomputers can deliver up to nearly a hundred quadrillions of FLOPS.

A most powerful supercomputer can occupy a few feet to hundreds of feet and the supercomputer price is very high.

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is a premier R&D organization under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for carrying out R&D in IT, Electronics and associated areas.

C-DAC was established in 1988 to build Supercomputers in the backdrop of denial of import of Supercomputers by the USA. Since then C-DAC has been involved in the building of multiple generations of Supercomputer starting from PARAM with 1 GF in 1988.