For the first time the government is opening up its supercomputing programme to private players and this has resulted in interest being shown by many big companies. Multinational biggies like Lenovo, Hewlett Packard, Acer, EMC Corporation, and IBM are in contest for winning the National Supoercomuting Mission which involves a network of super computers which can help strengthen India’s research and predictive capabilities in areas such as weather and climate modelling, biology and disaster management.
According Rajat Moona, director-general of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, referring to the capabilities of CDAC, the Indian Institute of Science and other government agencies, “Building these super computers requires huge facilities which we don’t have. At present we are in talks with a lot of companies and will soon go to the RFP (request for proposal) stage etc.” This was said to Economic Times.
The government wants to build 70 supercomputers and it is a huge task and involves money worth Rs 4,500 crore approved by the central government in March 2015 for this project. India currently has only 10 super computers and is ranked 74th in global supercomputing pecking order which is led by China. The world’s fastest supercomputer is China’s Tianhe-2.
By Atanu Kumar Das
