technology

India to get its first ‘Make in India’ super computer by 2017

India is all set to have an indigenously-built supercomputer by 2017. The Central government on March 25 this year approved the launch of National Supercomputing Mission to connect national academic and R&D institutions with a grid of over 70 high-performance computing facilities at an estimated cost of Rs 4,500 crore.

Whats is a super computer?

A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers.  The chief difference between a supercomputer and a mainframe is that a supercomputer channels all its power into executing a few programmes as fast as possible, whereas a mainframe uses its power to execute many programs concurrently. The performance or processing speed of supercomputer is measured in petaflop that is equal to a million billion or a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. These massive machines are not made for fun but rather help scientists, meteorologists to do research or forecast global climate and whether, while some are used being to simulate brain activity or effects of storm or wind on a plane.

How a super computer will benefit India

The mission will enable India to leapfrog to the league of world-class computing power nations. The government plans to install 73 supercomputers in different parts of the country and all will be linked by a computer grid. As far as supercomputing is concern India is ranked at number 74 and China is number 1. There are 500 supercomputers in world and India has only 9.

The government had in March last year approved the plan of the National Supercomputing Mission, under which 80 supercomputers will be built in the next seven years.

“Some of them will be imported and the rest will be built indigenously. The first one will come up by August 2017,” said Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology .

“We are working on how to control heat. The cost of power to run these supercomputers alone will be around Rs 1,000 crore,” he added.

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