New Delhi: The Indian government has begun the process of having 70 supercomputers in the country, which will enable research in different fields ranging from climate, defence and other areas, which a normal computer is ill-equipped for.

The project will not only benefit government agencies, but also the private sector in carrying out high-level research in various fields.

The computer would have a capacity (speed) of half petaflop to 20 petaflop, but by the time the project reaches its full peak, the speed of the supercomputers can 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 entire project will cost around Rs. 4,500 crore and 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).

The supercomputers, currently confiend to PARAM supercomputers Delhi, will be set up in different parts of country, informed Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary of DST.

The government has formed modalities to discuss nitty-gritty of the project and is expected to be operational by 2022.

The government will allow scientists/researchers affiliated with the government institutions to use the supercomputers for their research in various fields.

“Many companies have scientists doing their research. They need not go abroad for their research and can instead use these supercomputers,” Sharma said.

“We will be having these computers across the country where scientists can come and do their research. These can do calculations which your normal desktop or laptop cannot. It can help in defence simulation, computing, biology and material science and earth science,” Sharma said.

However, there are challenges before the plan is undertaken at a full-scale level. First would be building both software and hardware infrastructure for such a large-scale project and making applications for these supercomputers.

More importantly, the government will need highly skilled manpower for running these supercomputers.

(With PTI Inputs)