National Supercomputing Mission Conclave addresses challenges in Exa-scale Computing

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) are implementing the mission jointly through the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as implementing agencies. The National Supercomputing Conclave, a maiden initiative, is being taken today to explore the challenges in Exa-scale computing as well as mobilizing industry participation and capacity building. IESA is proud to be a part of this initiative as an execution partner.

National Supercomputing Mission, launched by the Government of India in 2015, is being implemented over 7 years and the budget outlay is Rs.4,500 crore. Further, the Mission supports government's vision of “Digital India” and “Make in India” initiatives and aims at enabling India to leapfrog to the league of other global computing power nations.

Speaking on the same, Dr Vijay Bhatkar, as architect of India’s national initiative on supercomputing and Chancellor of Nalanda University, says, “National Supercomputing Mission has potential to transform Indian IT industry to truly high value adding IP-based knowledge industry from its essentially service-based nature. India must invoke its strengths in mathematics, algorithms, analytics, linguistics and deep learning and move to the next level of software development.”

“The major goal of National Super Computing Mission is to provide access to state-of-the-art and contemporary supercomputing infrastructure to our scientific community so that our dream of becoming first-rate, world-class research community is realized faster,” says Prof. N. Balakrishnan, Indian Institute of Science.

Also, Dr K.D. Nayak, Former DG, DRDO & Member NSM-TAC, said, “We have brought together some 150+ scientific minds from the Government, academia, research community, IT industry, processor, accelerator, server and high-performance computing OEMs, professional societies and key users on a common platform to brainstorm and create the roadmap, with an aim to Transform India through Computational Knowledge (TICK) in this critical and strategic space.”

Each of the key speakers of the conclave emphasised the importance of the NSM Conclave which coincides with the vision of the country across the verticals, namely Supercomputing Facilities and Infrastructure; Research & Development; Application Development; Human Resource Development. On the sidelines of the event, Ashwini Aggarwal, Chairman of IESA, and Dr Sandeep Garg, President of IESA, also concurred to share the vision of the National Supercomputing Mission and emphasised on the support by the entire ESDM industry towards meeting this vision goal.