Why in news?

• French IT services firm Atos has won a three-year contract to build the first phase of supercomputers under India’s Rs 4,500-crore National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM):

• The Mission envisages empowering national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of 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 NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network.
• The Mission includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications.
• India looks forward to create a cluster of machines for weather forecasting, drug discovery and data mining.

Implementation:

• The NSM is divided into two key tracks, build and buy, which are being spearheaded by the C-DAC and Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science respectively.
• Atos has won the contract for the ‘build’ part of the NSM for which it will partner CDAC in all three phases of the project.
• While Phase I involves assembling of the supercomputers, in Phase II, certain components like the motherboards would be manufactured locally, and in the third phase, the supercomputer would be designed in India by C-DAC.
• In Phase II, it will be an aggregate of 10 petaflop, but the number of computers is yet to be decided.
• In the first phase, IIT-Kharagpur will have a 1.3 petaflop machine and IISER Pune and IIT-BHU will have a 650 teraflop computer each.
• The Mission would be implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) over a period of seven years.
• The tender to build these high performance computers (HPC) had been floated by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
• Atos would be deploying its energy efficient Direct Liquid Cooled Bull Sequana supercomputers in India.