A decade ago India was a leader in supercomputing, today it has slipped down to 14th place in the global ranking, observes the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment & Forests in its 258th report tabled earlier this month in the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha.

Pointing out that boosting indigenous efforts in supercomputing capability was in the “strategic interests” of the country, especially when the nation was known world wide for its skills in information technology, the Committee pins its hopes on the National Supercomputing Mission which is a seven-year project with a total budget allocation of ₹4,500 crore.

The Committee says in its report, “considering the significance of supercomputing, the Department (of Science & Technology - DST) should make every possible effort including establishment of requisite ecosystem for the success of the Mission to successfully implement the project in a time-bound manner,” emphasising that the allocated outlays for the scheme be “fully utilised”.

Of the total budget allocated to the Supercomputing Mission, DST's contribution is slotted at ₹2,740 crore and Department of Electronics & Information Technology’s (DietY) at ₹1,760 crore. The key deliverables of the project include 73 high performance computing (HPC) installations linked by a computer grid, development of HPC applications, Million-core cloud, 20,000 professionals who are HPC -aware and research and development for the next generation Exa-Scale HPC.

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