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India is all set to step up its supercomputing capabilities and capacity with the Planning Commission seeking to take this as “a principal initiative in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012-17) in consultation with other line Ministries and research and scientific institutions”.
Disclosing this to Business Line here in an exclusive talk, the Minister of State for Planning and Science & Technology and Earth Science, Dr Ashwani Kumar, said that the Plan panel has got a specific report commissioned on the subject and recently flagged off the first round of discussion.
China's capabilities
Elaborating upon the “overarching” priority to underpin supercomputing capabilities of the country, Mr Kumar contended that in 2007-08, the country's supercomputing capabilities were more or less equal to that of China but since then China's capabilities in high-speed supercomputing has grown by “leaps and bounds”. The situation today, he said, is that the fastest super-computer in the world as listed in the Top 500 is China's Tianhe achieving 2.7 PetaFLOPs on the HP-LINPACK. This has a combination of more than 186,000 codes of general purpose processors and graphic processing units with a peak computing capability of 4.7 PetaFLOPs. This capacity, Mr Kumar said, is “so significantly higher than the capabilities in India that we need to quickly catch up for strategic, defence reasons and to meet the data processing needs for various policies within the country”.
That is also the reason why the Plan panel commissioned a report and is intent on holding a series of follow-up discussions with stakeholders, he said. “We are informed that it may be possible for us to reduce the gap with China as also between us and the US in the next four years for which a significantly enhanced outlay of Rs 10,000 crore, comprising Rs 5,100 crore immediately, and the balance for achieving EXA scale will be necessary,” Mr Kumar said.
He further said a four-layered approach has been recommended in setting up multiple large-scale national centres for high-performance computing with supporting capabilities. Simultaneously EXA scale computing programme is to be set off so that at the end of the12th Plan the country has its own EXA scale computing, he said adding that India needs PetaFLOPs computing capability by 2010 in order to maintain progress in super computing capability by 2012 in order to maintain progress in super computing.
Software libraries
Alongside, he said, the country also needs software libraries as an essential component of the super-computing and platform-specific libraries, besides hardware/software, skilled manpower and institutions as well as institutional users. He said “no country has been able to achieve super computing of the size we are endeavouring without all the components in the strategy being in place”. As the computing architecture changes with new technology and processing in place, he said, new software will also be required.
In order to have the requisite simulation for predicting earthquakes, efficiency in military applications and in atomic energy simulations, in biological applications as also in aero space engineering, climate modelling and four our energy and food security applications, “enhanced supercomputing is an absolute national imperative”, Mr Kumar said.
He said the government would “leave no stone unturned in achieving this crucial national priority for giving to the country a cutting-edge technological superiority vis-à-vis our competitors and also to ensure our strategic parity with countries such as China”.
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