Planning Commission drafts National Supercomputing roadmap

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and the Planning Commission has outlined a National Supercomputing Roadmap in the 12th Plan document (2012-2017) to address the need to rejuvenate the supercomputing leadership.

The roadmap deals with several aspects of supercomputing that includes Architecture, Supercomputing Grid resting on National Knowledge Network and the Million Core Cloud supercomputer.

As per the information shared by Minister of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences S.Jaipal Reddy in a written question to the Lok Sabha, "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."

In order to meet the demands of the scientific community from all disciplines, the roadmap suggests capacity and capability development in the area of hardware and more in the area of application software.

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, as per the government release.

Strategies are being prepared the DST, the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (Deity), Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune to implement the programme successfully.