The government has deployed 37 supercomputers across the country under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), with a combined computing capacity of 40 petaflops, according to information presented in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday by Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada.
The NSM, launched in 2015 with an outlay of ₹4,500 crore, aims to achieve self-reliance in high-performance computing by creating advanced research infrastructure and enabling domestic development of critical supercomputing components. The mission is jointly implemented by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) through C-DAC, Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
Of the 37 systems installed so far, 34 were deployed over the past five years. Another six supercomputers, with a combined outlay of ₹680 crore, are currently being set up in institutions such as IISc, IITs, C-DAC centres, R&D labs, and universities in Tier-II and Tier-III cities.
A major milestone under the mission is the deployment of the “PARAM Rudra” series, built using indigenously designed and manufactured Rudra high-performance computing servers and a fully developed domestic software stack. These systems are available to researchers, scientists and engineers for advanced work in physics, earth sciences, cosmology and related fields.
The supercomputers are operating at high utilisation levels – most above 81% and some above 95%. They have supported more than 13,000 researchers, including over 1,700 PhD scholars from 260 institutions. More than one crore compute jobs have been completed using NSM systems, contributing to over 1,500 published research papers. Startups and MSMEs are also using the supercomputers for HPC-dependent projects.
The NSM has supported research in drug discovery, disaster management, energy security, climate modelling, astronomy, computational chemistry, materials science, fluid dynamics, and aerospace engineering.
Key indigenous achievements under the mission include: development and manufacturing of the Rudra Server Board, with technology transferred to three EMS partners; high-speed interconnect technologies tested at 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps; indigenous cooling technologies now entering deployment; a complete HPC system software stack integrated with NSM systems; PARAM Shavak, a compact “supercomputing-in-a-box” system for educational institutions; development of HPC applications in genomics, drug discovery, flood forecasting, disaster management, weather modelling, seismic data processing and material science, in collaboration with agencies such as IMD, ONGC, CWC, CPCB and the Ministry of Ayush; and ongoing efforts to design and develop indigenous HPC processors, accelerators and storage systems.
The Ministry of Electronics & IT said that the mission reflects the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of achieving supercomputing self-reliance by creating both capability and domestic manufacturing capacity.
A full list of deployed supercomputers, including locations and capacities, shows installations across IITs, IISERs, C-DAC centres and research institutions in more than 15 states. The total computing capacity deployed under the NSM has now reached 40 petaflops.
