National Missions
The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was launched in 2015 with the goal to connect national academic and R&D (research and development) institutions with a grid of over 70 high-performance computing facilities, which would enable India to leapfrog to the league of world-class computing power nations. NSM is being implemented by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Govt. of India at an estimated cost of Rs. 4,500 crore over a period of 7 years. The Mission supports the government's 'Digital India' and 'Make in India' initiatives. In Supercomputing, India is ranked at 74 globally and has only 9 supercomputers out of more than 500 in the world. NSM has been conceptualised and evolved taking into account the ever increasing computing demand of our scientific and academic community, international technology trends and roadmaps, strategic importance and emergence of supercomputing as a benchmark for scientific and technological advancements.
The Mission envisages empowering academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities. These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN). The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network. Academic and R&D institutions as well as key user departments/ministries would participate by using these facilities and develop applications of national relevance. The Mission also includes development of highly professional and skilled human resource for meeting the challenges of development of these applications. The implementation of this Mission would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large Scientific & Technology community in the country and enable the country with a capacity of solving multi-disciplinary grand challenges of national and global relevance.
NSM intends to attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology. The application areas include: Climate Modelling, Weather Prediction, Aerospace Engineering, Computational Biology, Molecular Dynamics, Atomic Energy Simulations, National Security/ Defence Applications, Seismic Analysis, Disaster Simulations and Management, Computational Chemistry, Computational Material Science and Nanomaterials, Astrophysics, Large Complex Systems Simulations, Cyber Physical Systems, Big Data Analytics, Finance, Information repositories/ Government Information Systems etc.