India is looking to become self-reliant in supercomputing by establishing a national capacity for manufacturing relevant critical components in-country. This development provides the biggest impetus yet to making high-performance computing accessible to India’s researchers.
Sanjay Dhotre, Union Minister of State for E&IT, Education and Communications said that the collaborative venture is another important step towards Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self-reliant India).
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and National Supercomputing Mission host institutes signed am Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that would establish the necessary supercomputing infrastructure in various premier institutions across India.
The aim is to establish a dependable and secure exascale eco-system with innovative designs, disruptive technologies and expert human resource. The end goal is to develop our indigenous hardware encompassing exascale chip design, design and manufacture of exascale server boards, exascale interconnects and storage including silicon-photonics in line with Atmanirbhar Bharat mission to achieve complete self Reliance.
India’s national premier academic and research institutes like the IISc, IITs, NIT, NABI are par excellence and is renowned globally for their technical expertise. Under the second phase of the National Supercomputing Mission, 13 institutes have signed MoUs for establishing supercomputing infrastructure.
The partnership of C-DAC and NSM host institutes will enhance India’s capability, empower scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities, attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of Supercomputing Technology leading towards the Exascale Computing.
C-DAC is firmly accelerating its pace of research and innovation using computational science techniques for manufacturing critical supercomputing components in India.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) enables supercomputing infrastructure with assembly and manufacturing of critical components at IISC Bangalore, IIT Kanpur, IIT Roorkee, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Guwahati, IIT Mandi, IIT Gandhinagar, NIT Trichy and NABI Mohali.
The MoU also facilitates NSM Nodal Centres for training in HPC & AI at IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Goa and IIT Palakkad.
The National Supercomputing Mission was set up to provide necessary computational power to the academia, industry, the scientific and research community, MSME and start-ups to solve India-specific critical challenges and complex real-life problems in science and engineering.
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is the premier R&D organisation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for carrying out R&D in IT, Electronics and associated areas. Different areas of C-DAC had originated at different times, many of which came out as a result of the identification of opportunities.
C-DAC has already established Supercomputing Ecosystem at IIT BHU, IIT Kharagpur, IISER Pune and JNCASR Bangalore. It is now focussed on increasing the pace of research and innovation using computational science techniques for manufacturing supercomputing components like the server boards, interconnects, rack power controllers and hydraulic controllers, direct liquid-cooled data centres and HPC software stacks in India.