The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was launched in 2015, jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising more than 70 high-performance computing facilities. These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN).

The objectives of the Mission are as follows:

• To make India one of the world leaders in supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance.
• To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains.
• To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing.
• To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.

The following are the various achievements of the Mission:

• Development and deployment of various supercomputers: In the first phase, PARAM Shivay, PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, and PARAM Sanganak were deployed at IIT (BHU), IIT Kharagpur, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Research.
  • Also, PARAM-Siddhi AI, which has been ranked 63rd in the Top 500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world was developed under the NSM.
• Industry and academia linkage: C-DAC had inked MoUs with IITs along with IISc, National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, and NIT, Tiruchirappalli – where a High-Performance Computing HPC) system in each institute is currently being installed.
• Training of manpower: Over 4,500 people have been trained in HPC and further training in Artificial Intelligence will be held at special NSM nodal centers established at four IITs Kharagpur, Madras, Goa, and Palakkad.
• Technology demonstration and deployment: India’s first indigenous server platform called ‘Rudra’, which can meet the HPC requirements of all governments and PSUs as well as the strategic needs of the country and an indigenous HPC interconnect called “Trinetra” for efficient inter-node communication between compute nodes have been developed under the NSM..

Implementation of the Mission has helped bring supercomputing within the reach of the large scientific and technology community in the country and enabled the country with a capacity to solve multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.