The super secretive story of India’s Rs 4500 cr supercomputing mission

No functional website, no roadmap, no stated problems to solve and above all, no table where the buck stops. If at all the work is progressing, it is by word of mouth

The 7-year National Supercomputing Mission was meant to create 73 clusters and get the industry, academics and students into the thriving world of High Performance Computing (HPC)

Two years later, not one supercomputer has been installed. More worryingly, no roadmap or vision document has been shared publicly

While money has been sanctioned, there’s no clarity how will it be spent and what are the deliverables

HPC is a strategic technology with high commercial yield. India missed the bus in early 2000s, it is poised to miss it again

“We are going to install 73 supercomputers in different parts of the country and all will be linked by a computer grid,” said a government statement on 25 March 2015, the day the NDA government approved a Rs 4,500-crore (~ $670 million) plan towards a National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). Rs 2,800 crore would come from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Rs 1,700 crore from the Department of IT.

As goals went, it was not only audacious but also sensible. Rs 4,500 crore over seven years to make ‘home brew supercomputers’ a reality in India.

AUTHOR

Seema Singh

Seema has over two decades of experience in journalism. Before starting The Ken, Seema wrote “Myth Breaker: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech”, published by HarperCollins in May 2016. Prior to that, she was a senior editor and bureau chief for Bangalore with Forbes India, and before that she wrote for Mint. Seema has written for numerous international publications like IEEE-Spectrum, New Scientist, Cell and Newsweek. Seema is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a MacArthur Foundation Research Grantee.

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