Representational Image of a Super Computer (Thinkstock)

The Narendra Modi government has begun the process of having 70 super computers in the country, which will enable high-level research in different fields for not only government agencies but also the private sector.The super computer will help India do research in different fields ranging from climate, defence and other areas.The computers would have a capacity (speed) ranging from half petaflop to 20 petaflop. By the time the project reaches its full peak, the speed of the super computers may go up to 50 petaflop. A petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second."The project, which costs around Rs 4,500 crore is in its nascent stage. It will come up with association of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Information and Technology (DIT). These super computers will be in different parts of country," Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary of DST, said.The government has formed modalities to discuss the details of the project. However, sources pointed out that it is expected to take up to seven years for the project to complete."We will be having these computers available across the country where scientists can come and do their research. It can help in defence simulation, computing, biology and material science, and earth science," Mr Sharma said.He confirmed that scientists and researchers other than those affiliated to government institutions can also use the super computers."Many companies have scientists doing their research. They need not go abroad for their research and can use these super computers instead," Mr Sharma said.

However, there are challenges before the plan is undertaken at a full-scale level. The main challenge will be to build infrastructure for such a large-scale nationwide project and making applications for these super computers.More importantly, having the manpower for running these super computers will be a challenge since it requires special training to be able to run and maintain them.