Lok Sabha Question No. 248 (STARRED), answered on 2016-08-03
Subject: High Performance Computing
Ministry: EARTH SCIENCES
Asked by: FEROZE VARUN GANDHI

## *248.

## GOVERNMENT OF INDIA LOK SABHA

## MINISTRY OF EARTH SCIENCES

## STARRED QUESTION No. *248 TO BE ANSWERED ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2016

## HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING

## SHRI FEROZE VARUN GANDHI:

Will the Minister of EARTH SCIENCES be pleased to state:

- the  progress  made  in  the  strategic  programme  of  the  High
- (a) Performance Computing (HPC) projects so far;
- (b) the  expenditure  incurred  and  the  objectives  achieved  there from;
- (c) whether  the  desired  progress  has  not  been  made  due  to  funds constraints and  if so, the steps taken by the Ministry in consultation with the Ministry of Finance to increase the budgetary allocation for the project; and
- (d) the present budgetary allocation for the project and the details of the expansion plans of the project?

## ANSWER

MINISTER FOR MINISTRY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AND

MINISTRY OF EARTH SCIENCES (DR. HARSH VARDHAN)

- (a)-(d) A statement is laid on the Table of the House.

## STATEMENT LAID ON THE TABLE OF THE LOK SABHA IN REPLY (a) to (d) TO STARRED QUESTION NO. *248 REGARDING 'HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING' TO BE ANSWERED ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2016

- (a) The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was approved by Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) in March 2015 with an outlay of Rs 4500 Cr (Department of Science and Technology (DST) Rs 2740 Cr + Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) Rs 1760 Cr)  spread  over  a  period  of  seven  years.  The  main  objective  of  the mission was creating supercomputing infrastructure of various capacities, developing applications of national importance and capacity building though human resources development. The mission is being  jointly  implemented  by  Centre  for  Development  of  Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Banglore.

NSM Technical Advisory Committee (NSM-TAC) was constituted under the chairmanship of Dr. V. K. Saraswat, Member, Niti Aayog to provide due guidance for implementation. Constitution of four Expert Groups (i) Infrastructure;  (ii)  Research  and  Development  (R&D);  (iii)  Application Development;  and  (iv)  Human  Resources  Development  were  setup  to provide  guidance  for  executing  the  mission. At  present  technology partners are being identified for NSM  through the process of Expression of Interest (EOI).

NSM  Expert  Group  on  Application  Development  has  identified  the following preliminary applications for taking up R&D projects.

-  Drug Discovery platform for neglected diseases.
- 
- Predictive and personalized medicine.
-  A  package  of  analysis  and  design  of  engineering  products  and processes (including SME, MSME).
- 
- Design of molecules and materials for societal benefits.
-  Integrated weather and disaster predictions and seismic imaging.
- 
- Urban well-being.
-  Biomedical and clinical data warehouse with multipurpose tool for mining the integrated resources.
- 
- Biodiversity mapping through remote sensing.
-  A  collection  of  tools  and  methods  for  NSM  including  cyber security.
-  E-Teacher: Engineering and Computations.
-  Astronomy, Astrophysics and high energy physics.
-  Computational Chemistry.

In addition, a separate programme 'Implementation of HPC system as approved by CCEA on 6th Feb 2014 for implementation during the 12th plan  with  a  total  outlay  of  Rs  567.16  crores  for  augmenting  the  High Performance  Computing  (HPC)  infrastructure  in  Ministry of Earth Sciences  towards  the  development  of  the state-of-art  dynamical models for improving the weather and climate prediction. Accordingly, two  HPC  systems  'Aaditiya'  with  a  peak  computing  power  of  790 Teraflops  and  "Bhaskara"  with  a  peak  computing  power  of  350  Tera Flops  have  been  installed  and  commissioned  at  Indian  Institute  of Tropical  Meteorology  (IITM),  Pune  and  National  Centre  of  Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), NOIDA respectively.

- (b) Release of first installment of Grant in Aid of Rs 50.0 Crore and Rs 70.0 Crore  was  made  by  DeitY  and  DST  to  C-DAC  and  IISc  respectively towards launching preparatory activities.

In  MoES,  the  expenditure  incurred  so  far  is  Rs.  206.95  crore.    The present  HPC  facility  is  being  used  for  assimilating  all  type  of  data available from various observing platforms and running high resolution weather and climate models for producing accurate weather forecast in short, medium, long range and climate scale.  The HPC is also used for the development of very high resolution dynamical models with high complexity and coupled ocean atmosphere models at monthly, seasonal and climate time scale.

- (c) No Madam.
- (d) Budgetary  allocation  for  2015-16  was  174  crore  and  for  2016-17  is 812.50 crore.

Experts groups on infrastructure is providing directions for entry level, mid  range  and  large  HPC  systems  setup  in  research  institutes  with varying  capacities  and  capabilities.  The  focus  is  to  build  systems  in India as part of Make in India approach in a phased manner.

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