India plans fastest supercomputer by 2017

Government is all set for developing the next generation of supercomputers. Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal have share the roadmap which has been made by C-DAC to develop petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers. It is estimated that the cost to develop this will be around Rs 4,700 crore over 5 years.

A petaflop is a measure of a computer s processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. Exaflop is one quintillion computer operations per second. If the Indian government approves this proposal than it will be at least 61 times faster than Sequoia, the fastest supercomputer in the world which is equivalent of computing of power from over 7.8 lakhs high-end laptops put together.

The mastermind behind this propsal, C-DAC, also developed first supercomputers in the country, the PARAM series. Presently Param Yuva with 54 teraflop computing power is serving many researchers through Garuda Computing Grid,

Sibal has proposed that DEITY should be given tasks to coordinate overall supercomputing activities in the country as it has been done in the past as well as should be given task to set up a National Apex Committee to oversee the implementation of the proposed Supercomputing Mission and C- DAC should establish peta and exascale supercomputing facilities and development activities.