India’s Desi Supercomputer to be a Foreign Affair

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India’s drive for a desi supercomputer will predominantly be a foreign affair with at least 12 companies, including a host of multinationals and a smattering of small domestic players, in the race to build it.

 

The clutch of companies that include the likes of Intel, Dell, Lenovo, IBM, Cray and Atos are bidding to make the supercomputer which is part of the ambitious Rs 4500 crore National Supercomputer Mission that seeks to put together a network of 70 high-performance computing facilities on a super grid over the next five to six years.

The Mission, being taken up in tandem with another ambitious project, the India Microprocessor Mission, are aimed at building indigenous capabilities in designing and building computers and chips for them, both a strategic need if one considers. However, pragmatism rules India’s approach to building both of these, says member NITI Aayog and former Secretary Dept. Of Defence and Director General DRDO V K Saraswat.  

Speaking at a recent conference on chip design, Saraswat had a few interesting observations on India’s drive for “indigenous” computing technologies. There is no way India can aspire to have a 100 percent desi supercomputer he allured. The basic reason is that India does not have the ecosystem to develop all the components that go into making one nor does it have the market to sustain this ecosystem thereafter.

For instance, while efforts are on to make an indigenous chip, the country does not yet have a chip-making fab save for a facility to make 180 Nm CMOS chip on an eight inch wafer at the Semiconductor Complex Ltd., in Chandigarh. Moreover we do not know how to market the chip. 

The world has moved on to 32 nm and 14 nm and further to 7 nm chips. And clearly, industry giants have ruled out any possibility of sustaining any new fab in the country. 

In fact from a huge list of 29 fabs across the world 2016 saw the list whittle down to just four in 2015-16, points out Sanjay Jha, CEO, Global Foundries, the world’s second largest chip-maker. Consolidation activity was at its peak in 2016 with established players gobbling up even medium sized but unsustainable foundries.  

Not surprisingly the Indian efforts at making the indigenous microprocessor could be limited to designing one that too based on open architecture rather than developing one of its own. And then the actual fabrication may have to happen be elsewhere.

Coming to India’s supercomputer drive, development partnerships with the private sector and collaboration is the focus. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) is spearheading the project while the National Supercomputer Missions (NSM) itself is being implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).

The Mission envisages a predominantly academic and R&D computing behemoth networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN). One of the various objectives of the Mission is to develop High Performance Computing (HPC) human resource within the country for future implementations.