India has satisfied its supercomputing needs, but not its ambitions

Supercomputing Month In the decade since India launched its National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), the nation has commissioned 37 machines with a combined power of 39 petaFLOPS, with another 35-petaFLOPS hybrid due to come online later this year. But while plenty of those machines use locally developed technology, India is yet to deliver on its ambition to become a leader or major semiconductor player.

India launched the NSM in 2015 to ensure the country has the computing power its government and research sector need.

The NSM has mostly achieved the latter goal. More than 13,000 scholars can access the NSM's fleet, utilization rates sit at 85 to 95 percent, more than ten million workloads have run, and the fleet has helped to produce in excess of 1,500 peer-reviewed papers.

India's supercomputing efforts are overseen by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which in 2020 extended ...