India to get a new indigenously built supercomputer next year; Param team heading the project

India will get an indigenously built supercomputer next year as part of the government’s Rs 4,500-crore programme aimed at taking India into an elite league of nations who have made advancements in the field. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing that built India’s first supercomputer, Param, is handling the project, said Ashutosh Sharma, secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology. 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 be indigenously. The first one will come up by August 2017,” he said. “We are working on how to control heat. The cost of power to run these supercomputers alone will be around Rs 1,000 crore,” Sharma said. The new supercomputers will be kept in different institutes across the country. “A supercomputer can be used for various purposes like climate modeling, weather forecast, discoveries of drugs among others,” Sharma said. Currently, countries like the US Japan, China and the European Union account for a major share of the top supercomputing machines in the world. PTI