These specialized computers or the so called “supercomputers” are expected to work at a speed of 0.5 to 20 petaflop. Further, the speed of supercomputers would soar to a level of 50 petaflop when the project will be in full swing. Petaflop is a unit that measures the processing speed of a computer and it is expressed as 10^15 floating point operations per second. In an interview with Indian Express; Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary of Department of Science and Technology (DST) said: “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.” It seems Indian government has already set up proper methodologies to discuss the practical details and important aspects of the project. Some internal sources though feel that the project might take seven years to reach completion. Mr. Sharma added: “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 defense simulation, computing, biology and material science and earth science.” Indian government has further proposed that the super computers not only can be used by scientists and researchers affiliated to government institutions but it can also be used by those who are associated with the private institutions. Mr. Sharma continued: “Many companies have scientists doing their research. They need not go abroad for their research and can instead use these super computers.” There are various hurdles in the path of this project. The major challenge for now is to set up a hardware infrastructure for large scale research work and create a software that can be deployed on these super machines. Next, government would require highly skilled man power for handling these supercomputers in house.
