The government has drawn a blueprint to develop the next generation of supercomputers that could be 61 times faster than existing machines.
Telecom and IT minister Kapil Sibal is understood to have shared a roadmap with prime minister Manmohan Singh to develop "petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers" at an estimated cost of Rs 4,700 crore over 5 years.
"In his (Sibal) letter, he has said that C-DAC has developed a proposal with a roadmap to develop a petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers in the country with an outlay of Rs 4,700 crore," a government official said.
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, which is a thousand times faster than a petaflop.
The fastest supercomputer in the world, Sequoia, has registered a top computing speed of 16.32 petaflops which is equivalent of computing of power from over 7.8 lakhs high-end laptops put together.
If the exaflop supercomputer is approved, they will be at least 61 times faster than Sequoia according to officials.
India's top supercomputer at present ranks 58th globally in terms of computing speed.
"The minister has written that C-DAC 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," the official said. Sibal cited its achievements stating that The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was set up in 1987 by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi when technologically advanced nations denied supply of supercomputer to India in mid-1980s.
Sibal has proposed that Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) should be given tasks to coordinate overall supercomputing activities in the country as it has been done in the past.
The proposal says that DEITY should be given tasks to set up a National Apex Committee to oversee the implementation of the proposed Supercomputing Mission and C- DAC should establish peta and scale supercomputing facilities and development activities.