The need to rejuvenate the supercomputing leadership was felt and recommended by the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (SAC to PM) and also by the Planning Commission. The Planning Commission has drawn a National Supercomputing Roadmap in the 12th Plan document (2012-2017). This roadmap covers several aspects of supercomputing namely Architecture, Supercomputing Grid resting on National Knowledge Network and the Million Core Cloud supercomputer. The roadmap has projected development of high capacity petascale (over 1,000,000,000,000,000 flops) supercomputers and technologies that may create an opening leading to building Exa-scale (over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 flops) supercomputing capability. It also suggests capacity and capability development in the area of hardware and more in the area of application software to meet the demands of the scientific community from all disciplines.
The Planning Commission has allotted Rs.2000 crore in the 12th Five Year Plan for the Department of Science & Technology (DST) against a projected requirement of ` 5000 crore. The DST and the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (Deity) in consultation with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune are preparing the strategies for implementing this programme. So far no expenditure has been incurred.
The Minister of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences Shri S.Jaipal Reddy gave this information in reply to a written question in the Lok Sabha today.
Tags: Supercomputing
Prime Minister
Planning Commission
Five Year Plan