Government spends Rs 1,218 crore to commission 24 PF compute capacity: MoS IT

The Government has spent Rs 1,218.14 crore in the last eight years to set up 24 PetaFlops compute capacity under the National Supercomputing Mission, Parliament was informed on Friday.

Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha said that systems have been commissioned at 20 academic institutions, organisations and Research and Development (R&D) labs across the country.

PetaFlop level computing speed can perform quadrillion calculations per second and is important for high-performance computing, especially in the field of climate monitoring, drug discovery, astrophysics etc, and now for developing and supporting artificial intelligence technologies.

"NSM (National Supercomputing Mission) was initiated in April 2015, with a budget outlay of Rs 4,500 crore for seven years. An amount of Rs 1,218.14 crore has been spent till date for the mission activities.

Till date, systems with a total of 24 PF compute capacity have been commissioned at 20 academic institutions, organisations and Research and Development (R&D) labs across the country," Chandrasekhar said.

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

Under the mission, the supercomputer commission at C-DAC Pune is of the highest capacity. The system has a total peak computing capacity of 5.2 PetaFlops (PF) and can support 210 PF (AI) performance, with 42 compute nodes and 1 login node.