High Performance Computing most generally refers to the practice of aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation in order to solve large problems in science, engineering, or business. In pursuance of this objective, the “National Supercomputing Mission (NSM): Building Capacity & Capability”, has been initiated by Government of India in April 2015.
National Supercomputing Mission
The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is being implemented jointly by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. The main objectives of the mission are:
- Make India a world leader in HPC and to enhance the national capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
- Empower scientists & researchers with state-of-the-art compute facilities for their cutting-edge research in respective Domains
- Reduce redundancies and avoid duplication of efforts and investments
- Create an ecosystem for positioning India as a major power for supercomputing and attain global competitiveness and self-reliance in HPC
Creation of supercomputing infrastructure is being done across the country at educational and research institutions, including a National AI facility at CDAC Pune. Some of these systems are being deployed with indigenously designed systems and would be serving many institutes across the nation. Under R&D, the supercomputer basic building blocks (Compute node, Interconnect switch, System software stack, Direct contact liquid cooling etc) have been indigenously developed, tested and demonstrated. Development of indigenous HPC processor based on Arm architecture has been initiated. Applications development for national need has been initiated in consortium mode in various domains and is at various stages of development. The domains include Urban Modelling, Flood forecasting, Seismic imaging, Genomics & Drug discovery and Material Science etc. Course curriculums developed for short term, long term and formal educational courses at UG and PG levels and training ongoing in areas of HPC in collaboration with academia and industry.
The thrust areas of the division are
- Promoting HPC to enhance the national capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance.
- Promoting Research & Development and Human Resource Development in the area of HPC.
