New Delhi: India will get a new and indigenously-built 'supercomputer' next year, says a government official.

The project is part of government's Rs 4,500-crore programme that aimed at taking India into the elite group of countries who have made similar advancements in the field of technology. The project is being handled by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing that built India’s first supercomputer, Param.

The government had in March last year approved the plan of the National Supercomputing Mission, under which 80 supercomputers will be built in the next seven years.

"Some of them will be imported and the rest will be built indigenously. The first one will come up by August 2017," said Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology .

"We are working on how to control heat. The cost of power to run these supercomputers alone will be around Rs 1,000 crore," he added.

Currently, countries like the US Japan, China and the European Union account for a major share of the top supercomputing machines in the world.

He said the new supercomputers would be kept in different institutes across the country and they can be used for various purposes like climate modeling, weather forecast, discoveries of drugs among others.

(With PTI inputs)