India’s 12th supercomputer installed successfully at IIT kharagpur

IIT Kharagpur on 12th September 2019 i.e. on Thursday got India’s 12th supercomputer installed successfully and there are four more to be installed in Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore & Kanpur by November.
IIT-BHU Varanasi in February got this year’s first supercomputer installed named ‘Param Shivay’ and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The ‘Param Shivay’ supercomputer of 833 teraflop capacity was built at a cost of Rs 32.5 crore. The ‘Param Shivay’ has become fully operational and it is being used for climate assessment, weather forecasting, space engineering, seismic analysis,  disaster simulation, and management, said the officials.
In 2015 National Supercomputing Mission(NSM) was launched to install 70 high-performance computing facilities in India, with a budget of 4,500 crore(INR) and these supercomputers are a part of this mission.
 
India’s first supercomputer called ‘PARAM 8000’ was installed in 1991. In the year 2022 when India will be celebrating its 75th independence, all the 70 supercomputers are expected to be installed.
NSM’s supercomputers will foster research in climate modeling, weather prediction, gene-editing, medicine, seismic analysis, atomic energy simulations, space exploration, and big data analytics among others.
After IIT Kharagpur, the next supercomputer to be installed is at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune and after this in the queue IIT Hyderabad, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) Bangalore and IIT Kanpur.
All 70 supercomputers will eventually be connected by The Center for Development of Advanced Computing(C-DAC) to a common national supercomputing grid under the National Knowledge Network(NKN) which aims to connect academic institutions and R&D labs over a high-speed network.
 
By the end of the next year, India is expected to add four more supercomputers taking its total tally to 20 in the second phase. India will, however, still be far behind the USA and China in terms of supercomputers. While China has over 220 and the USA has over 115 supercomputers.
The second phase would kickstart next year and most of the parts will be assembled and integrated within the country, except the chips, said Ashutosh Sharma, DST secretary while briefing media on Thursday over various projects of his department.
“Under phase three, we will be pretty much making our supercomputers, except the chips.” he was quoted as saying by a news agency.