India’s Prime Minister Modi has unveiled three PARAM Rudra supercomputers to the nation.
Developed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), with the cost of the three machines totaling INR 130 crore ($15.5m).
Launched in 2015, the NSM is a joint project between the Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and IT that aims to boost the country’s computational power, advance research, and position India as a supercomputing player on the global stage.
The machines have been installed at the Giant Metre Radio Telescope (GMRT) in Pune, the Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) in Delhi, and the S.N. Bose Centre in Kolkata.
The IUAC system is the most powerful of the three, with a capacity of three petaflops, while the GMRT system has a capacity of one petaflops. The machine at S.N. Bose has a capacity of 838 teraflops.
In a statement, DST said the new supercomputers would benefit thousands of researchers working in the eastern region of the country and would help India “compete globally in areas like space exploration and semiconductor manufacturing.”
It added: “The new capabilities of these machines are expected to play a crucial role in disaster management, economic growth, and enhancing the ease of doing business, making them central to India’s progress in Industry 4.0.”
In addition to the three PARAM Rudra supercomputers, Modi also unveiled a HPC system for weather and climate monitoring. Housed separately at two locations owned by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, one system has 11.77 petaflops of capacity and 33 petabytes of storage, while the second has 8.24 petaflops of capacity and 24 petabytes of storage.
