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The Ministry of Science and Technology has sanctioned a Rs 5,000-crore national supercomputing development project, which is aimed at enhancing the nation’s supercomputing capacity and bringing Indian institutions within the top 100 supercomputing countries in the world.
The ambitious project will be headed by Bangalore based Indian Institute of Science (IISc). India had once been at the number three position in the supercomputer space, and now it is ranked 140th globally. This has been is quite a climb down for India in supercomputing.
Professor N Balakrishnan, Associate Director, IISc, and supercomputing project coordinator, said, “There is an urgency among scientists and policy-makers that India has fallen behind in supercomputing. India is currently ranked 140th in the world; it was ranked third in 2007. The fall is drastic and alarming and has to be arrested immediately. IISc and DST will work to revive the country’s original strength.”
According to Balakrishnan the Rs 5,000 crore was a good initial investment, but any endeavour to build supercomputers of larger capacity will require ten times that amount. “The spinoff from this investment we are hoping will be an investment of at least Rs 50,000 crore by the industry which will have to play a major part in developing supercomputing capacity.”
Supercomputing involves capacity building, and not just fabrication and setting up of computers. Right technology is a must for building capacity. There is need for a wide range of sensors, plenty of intelligence-related equipment and cutting edge hardware. This will mean high investment. Once the product is ready, the main product and the peripherals can create business in the country.
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In the previous efforts to build supercomputing in India, we ended up funding projects in IISc, CDAC etc. However these ended up as damp squibs as they never really opened up the youth to teachers and students, or became a part of the culture iin the education system. Past record of access to supercomputing set up in IISc to those desirous of using it has been abysmally poor. We may be repeating the same mistake by just funding a small group in IISc once again without it becoming a truly national mission.
Here I may quote William Press of Harvard, "Simulation and Mathematical Modeling will drive the 21st Century just the way steam did in the 19th Century." Hence building a culture of supercomputing in the nation needs a national thrust in nurturing a national culture among the youth in colleges in the algorithms and their implementations in different architectures. The NAL group in Atmospheric Sciences did a great job in building a truly 'desi' supercomputer. Others essentially imported available hardware from abroad and used it for their own individual research interests.
I do hope that this time we learn from past poor record in this area. We need to set up a national mission in supercomputing with equal emphasis on UG and PG education in Simulation and Mathematical Modeling with opportunities for scholars to develop algorithms and applications. We may note that Supercomputing implies capacity for managing large volumes of data and capacity to build gigantic scientific databases. We have treated this vast and strategically important field in fragmented ways in the past. We need the spirit of NPTEL that engages large numbers of faculty across multiple institutions. Hopefully we shall not fall into the past trap of a few possessive researchers restricting the developments in this area. The new and younger scientific minds in this area should drive this project itself in well organized and professionally managed ways across an open network of institutions and scholars.
K.R. Srivathsan
January 19, 2012 at 10:52 am
I agree with Prof. Srivathsan as far as engg. domain is concerned. But, it is always amusing to see that any computing infrastructure is thought of as belonging to engg./technology domain alone and Humanities are never considered to be involved as participants/beneficiaries. Many grand challenge problems in language analyses demand enormous computing power. We could think of massive national initiatives in OCR, speech recognition, medicinal and literary palm-leaf studies and decipherment etc.
If linguists, academia in Arts/Basic Science/Social Sciences/Life sciences etc. are brought in harmoniously, a balanced development is possible.
Ramanujan
January 20, 2012 at 12:05 pm