New domestic supercomputers will be created and built under the National Supercomputing Mission in India. The first one will come up by August 2017, according to Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The new supercomputers will be kept in different institutes across the country. "A supercomputer can be used for various purposes like climate modeling, weather forecast, discoveries of drugs among others," Sharma said.
In April 2015, the Government of India approved the plan to build a cluster of 80 high-performance supercomputers with a total budget of Rs 4,500 crore (US $666 million) over a period of seven years. The mission supports the government's vision of "Digital India" and "Make in India" initiatives. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, which built India's first supercomputer, the PARAM 8000, is handling the project.
In the late 1980s, India started to develop its own supercomputer after it was denied the technology by the US due to an arms embargo imposed on the country, as it was a dual use technology and could be used in developing nuclear weapons. India's first supercomputer PARAM, which means "supreme" in Sanskrit, was indigenously built in 1990, and was replicated and installed at the Institute of Computer Aided Design of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1991 under Russian collaboration.
