Govt to install 73 supercomputers across the country: Ravi Shankar Prasad

New Delhi: As part of the initiative to push India's plans to be a world-class computing power, Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said Wednesday that the government will install 73 supercomputers in different parts of the country.

As fas as supercomputing is concerned, India is ranked at no. 74, Ravi Shankar Prasad said during a Union Cabinet meeting Wednesday.

The minister also said India has only nine supercomputers on the Top500 list ranking in the world.

In December last year, the finance ministry panel authorized the National Supercomputing Mission, which is being jointly managed by the department of science and technology and the department of electronics and information technology.

Meanwhile, top science centres in the country like ISRO, IISc and select IITs have started to work on a mission to build the fastest supercomputer that will work at exaflops per second.

India's supercomputer program was started in late 1980s.

PARAM 8000, which was indigenously built in 1990 by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, is considered India's first supercomputer. It was replicated and installed at ICAD Moscow in 1991 under Russian collaboration.