India's National Supercomputing Mission Progress and Achievements
India's National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), launched in April 2015 with an outlay of approximately ₹4,500 crore, has established a significant supercomputing ecosystem across the country. The mission is jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), with implementation by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
As of September 2026, NSM has deployed 40 supercomputers with a combined capacity of 68 petaflops (PF), including 13 high-end systems exceeding 1 PF, 12 mid-range systems with capacities between 500 teraflops (TF) and 1 PF, and 15 systems below 500 TF capacity. The mission plans to expand to 50 supercomputers with cumulative capacity exceeding 123 PF across academic and research institutions nationwide.
Indigenous Technology Development
The mission has achieved significant indigenous technological development, including the Rudra series of servers that have been indigenously designed and developed by C-DAC, with 6,000 servers already deployed in PARAM Rudra supercomputers and another 1,500 under manufacturing. Other developments include high-speed interconnect networks with speeds of 100 Gbps and 200 Gbps, indigenous cooling technology with better power efficiency, a complete HPC system software stack, and PARAM Shavak supercomputing-in-a-box solutions for educational institutions.
Applications and Impact
Supercomputers under NSM support applications across 11 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including a Genomics and Drug Discovery Platform used during COVID-19 for drug screening and side-effect prediction, Urban Environment Decision Support System for weather and pollution tracking, Seismic Imaging Suite for oil and gas exploration, Early Warning System for Flood Prediction for river basins including Mahanadi, Forest Fire Spread Model tested in Sikkim Himalayas, and Materials Science and Computational Chemistry Applications.
Research and Workforce Development
The NSM infrastructure has supported over 16,000 researchers including more than 2,900 PhD scholars across 400+ institutions, executing more than 1.5 crore compute jobs and contributing to over 1,990 research publications. The mission includes comprehensive training initiatives such as HPC and Deep Learning Awareness Programmes, hackathons and bootcamps, Faculty Development Programmes with AICTE, EduHPC workshops, SWAYAM platform courses, HPC Shiksha Portal, and NSM Users Forum.
Infrastructure and Future Direction
The National Knowledge Network (NKN) serves as the backbone connecting supercomputing facilities across institutions. The mission focuses on expanding computing capacity, developing faster and energy-efficient systems, strengthening Indian hardware and software capabilities, and integrating Artificial Intelligence with HPC for applications in weather, healthcare, agriculture, energy, drug discovery, and scientific research.