Why in news
- India's supercomputing network under the National Supercomputing Mission expanded to 40 supercomputers delivering 68 Petaflops of computational capacity as of 2026.
- The mission continues advancing indigenous hardware, liquid cooling, and high-performance computing applications in weather and domain science.
Key terms
Petaflop
Measure of computing speed equal to one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
High-Performance Computing (HPC)
Aggregation of processing power to execute complex computational simulations at high speeds.
PARAM Series
Line of indigenous supercomputers designed in India by C-DAC, initiated with PARAM 8000 in 1991.
Direct Liquid Cooling
Thermal management technique circulating liquid coolant near processors to lower energy consumption in high-density data centres.
What is the National Supercomputing Mission?
- Launched in 2015, jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- Implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
- Aims to construct a interconnected high-performance computing (HPC) grid across premier academic and research institutions.
Key Infrastructure and Indigenous Progress
- Transitions national infrastructure from imported computing nodes to indigenously designed servers, direct liquid cooling systems, and proprietary interconnects.
- Deploys computational power across climate modeling, flood forecasting, drug discovery, astrophysics, and artificial intelligence workloads.
Strategic Importance
- Reduces strategic dependence on foreign high-performance computing hardware while cultivating domestic chip assembly and software capacity.
- Provides computational backbones to process massive data volumes across national research labs and strategic sectors.
Prelims facts
- National Supercomputing Mission is jointly steered by DST and MeitY, implemented by C-DAC and IISc.
Mains discussion
- Discuss the role of indigenous High-Performance Computing in strengthening India's research capacity in weather forecasting and climate risk management.
Source: PIB
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