New Delhi: India’s supercomputing capabilities are expanding rapidly, with the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) enabling wider access to high-performance computing for applications ranging from artificial intelligence and weather forecasting to healthcare, disaster management and space research, the government said on Sunday.
India’s supercomputing journey has evolved significantly since the development of PARAM 8000 in the early 1990s, with the country now building a national high-performance computing ecosystem under the NSM, launched in April 2015.
As of September 2026, the mission has deployed 40 supercomputers with a combined computing capacity of 68 petaflops (PF), strengthening access to advanced computing infrastructure across research and academic institutions.
The government said high-performance computing is increasingly essential for accelerating scientific discovery and technological innovation, particularly as India’s digital ecosystem continues to generate large volumes of data.
India generates nearly 20 per cent of the world’s data, while emerging applications such as artificial intelligence, weather prediction, climate modelling and space research require increasingly powerful computing infrastructure.
Supercomputers enable massive datasets to be processed and complex simulations to be conducted at much faster speeds by combining large numbers of processors to perform calculations simultaneously. This makes them critical infrastructure for advanced scientific research and strategic applications.
The government said HPC is already supporting applications with direct societal benefits, including crop-yield prediction, disease-outbreak tracking, drug discovery and forecasting areas likely to be affected by river floods.
The technology is also being used across areas such as Computational Biology, Weather Prediction and Climate Modelling, Disaster Management, Big Data Analytics and Astrophysics, helping researchers tackle increasingly complex scientific and technological challenges.
The National Supercomputing Mission was launched with an outlay of around Rs 4,500 crore and is jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
The mission aims to strengthen self-reliance in supercomputing and build indigenous high-performance computing capabilities in India. It promotes the use of supercomputing for research, development and problem-solving across a range of scientific and technological disciplines, while also developing solutions for societal applications.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, are implementing the mission.
Under the NSM, India is also developing indigenous technologies covering servers, software, cooling systems and networking, alongside expanding its supercomputing infrastructure.
(IANS)
