(Image source from: })

India will be employing super computers, predominantly for defense research and predicting climatic changes by 2022. The grid-like setup of these research facilities have been approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs. Supercomputers will be having capacities ranging from 0.5 petaFlops to 20 petaFlops.

(A petaFlop is the measure of a computer’s processing speed). One petaFlop machine is capable of one quadrillion mathematical computations per second. By the time this project begins its operations at full steam, the speed of the supercomputers will reach 50 petaFlops, that’s an impressive 50 quadrillion mathematical computation per second.

The project is estimated to cost Rs 4500 crores. The supercomputers will be set up in coordination with the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Information and Technology (DIT). DST will be shelling out an amount of Rs 2800 crores and DIT will chip in Rs 1700 crores. The areas of R&D to benefit from these supercomputers include defense, biology, weather forecast, climate change and early warning defense systems.

Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC); the Indian Institute of Science (IISc); the Department of Science and Technology; and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology will be the prime beneficiaries of this project.

By Premji