National Supercomputing Mission (NAM)

National supercomputing mission was approved by the government of India as a 7-year supercomputing program with the aim to create a cluster of 73 Supercomputers to connect various academic and research institutions spread across the country with an investment of $730mn.

About Supercomputers? 

• A supercomputer is described as a system with high-level computing ability with great speed and memory as compared to a general-purpose computer.
• The performance of supercomputers is measured in FLOPS ( Floating Point Operations Per Second) and evaluated in Petaflops( 1 followed by 15 zeros).
• Supercomputers are different from normal computers as they are designed to deal with complex scientific calculations therefore they require a stronger system with high speed, great memory, and a very strong processor.
• Performance of Supercomputers are measured in FLOPS as shown in the table below:

Objectives of NSM 

• As a developing nation, India is striving towards emerging as a world leader and to do so it has to enhance its supercomputing ability and proving state of the art supercomputing facilities to its scientists and researchers to bring out cutting edge scientific solutions to modern problems.

• NSM aims at developing a highly professional High-Performance Computing(HPC) team to meet the challenges faced in the development of these applications.

• The responsibility of implementing the mission is given jointly to the Department of Science and Technology(DST) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology(DeitY).

• Supercomputers developed under this mission will be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network(NKN). 

National Knowledge Network connects academic institutions and Research and Development labs over a high-speed network.

Applications of Supercomputer

• Academic Research
• Medicine Discovery
• Big Data Mining
• Monsoon Forecasting
• Weather and Climate Modeling
• Molecular Dynamics
• Energy Security of Nation 
• Helping in transportation Sector
• Ensuring Energy Security of the nation.