Made-in-India supercomputers by August 2017 under govt's Rs 4,500-crore National Supercomputing Mission

India is all set to have an indigenously-built supercomputer by 2017. Government has launched a Rs 4,500-crore programme, which aims at helping India enter an elite league of nations who have made advancements in the field. The supercomputer project is being handled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, said Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology. Param, India’s first supercomputer was also built by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

Under the National Supercomputing Mission’s plan, which got an approval from the government in March last year, in next 7 years 80 supercomputers will be built. “Some of them will be imported and the rest will be built be indigenously. The first one will come up by August 2017,” said Sharma.

“We are working on how to control heat. The cost of power to run these supercomputers alone will be around Rs 1,000 crore,” he added. The new supercomputers will be kept in different institutes across the country. “A supercomputer can be used for various purposes like climate modeling, weather forecast, discoveries of drugs among others,” Sharma said. US, Japan, China and the European Union currently account for a major share of the top supercomputing machines in the world.