Question : National Supercomputing Mission

(a) the salient features of the National Supercomputing Mission including its roadmap, nodal bodies responsible for implementation, application groups of the Mission and the amount of funds sanctioned since the inception, year-wise;

(b) the composition and terms of reference of various committees that have been constituted for implementing the Mission; and

(c) whether supercomputers have been installed under the aegis of the Mission since its inception, year-wise and if so, the details thereof, year-wise and if not, the reasons therefor?

MINISTER OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, MINISTER OF EARTH SCIENCES AND MINISTER OF ENVIRONMENT, FOREST AND CLIMATE CHANGE
(DR. HARSH VARDHAN)

(a) The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is approved for implementation with total estimated cost of Rs.4,500 crore over a period of seven years. The Mission is to be jointly implemented by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST) along with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru as the implementing agencies. The contribution of MeitY would be Rs.1,760 crore and contribution of DST would be Rs.2740 crore.

Key Deliverables of the Mission include setting up of NSM facilities and infrastructure at 60 to 70 locations across the country; one Million core cloud with 25-30 Petabytes of storage; and a National Super Computing Grid by interconnecting various HPC systems over National Knowledge Network (NKN); R&D leading to next generation Exascale computing readiness; and HPC based applications in atleast 5 major areas; Human Resource Development (~20,000 trained professionals to handle and spearhead HPC activities).

The project was initiated in 2015-16 and total funds of Rs. 334.27 crore have been released for the Mission to Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, the two implementing agencies, by DST and MeitY.
(b) The composition alongwith its Terms of Reference of various committees namely the NSM-Executive Board, NSM-Technical Advisory Committee. NSM-Expert Groups in infrastructure, R&D, HRD and Applications are attached at Annexure.

(c) There are two approaches that were planned; "Build" & "Buy". Under "Build" approach in phase-1 purchase order for the following three systems has been issued:-

IIT, Kharagpur: 1.3 PF
IIT, Varanasi: 650 TF
IISER, Pune: 650 TF.

Currently technical evaluation is underway for the "Buy" systems.