National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

Context: The third phase of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) will kickstart in January 2020, taking computing speed to around 45 petaflops.

About NSM

The NSM is jointly steered by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

Objective of the Mission

• The Mission envisages empowering national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.

• These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN) which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high-speed network.

Recent Developments

• The first supercomputer assembled indigenously, called Param Shivay, was installed in IIT BHU. 

• Similarly, Param Shakti and Param Brahma were installed at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune. They are equipped with applications from domains like Weather and Climate, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bioinformatics, and Material science.

• Rudra, an indigenous server has been developed, which can meet the High-Performance Computing (HPC) requirements of all governments and PSUs.