India to Install 73 ‘Green’ Supercomputers in Next 3 Years

India plans to install 73 ‘green supercomputers’ in the next three years to enable high-performance computing with reduced power consumption, a scientist at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) said on Friday.

“Around five to 10 supercomputers will be installed this year and the rest in the next three years in phases. Through optimisation, power consumption of the machines will be reduced as less as possible,” Sanjay Wandhekar, associate director and head, High Performance Computing, C-DAC, Pune, told IANS.

Currently 11 Indian machines are on the list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, including two in the top 100.

C-DAC, which gave India its first supercomputer, said with the 73 ‘green’ machines, the country would be on the Top 500 Green computing list as well.

The machines are being developed under the Rs. 4,500-crores National Supercomputing Mission which is jointly handled by the departments of science and technology and electronics and information technology.

Wandhekar said 50 machines will be entry-level supercomputers, 20 of medium level and three will be of large capacity.

The Bhaskara supercomputer was announced in May to help meteorologists in conducting research and development related to prediction of weather including effective forecast of tropical cyclone, heavy rainfall and cloud burst events. The present augmentation enables Earth System Science Organisation – National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ESSO-NCMRWF) to provide high-resolution 10 days global weather forecast and prediction of extreme weather events using very high-resolution regional models with a horizontal resolution of 1.5km and probabilistic forecasts using an ensemble prediction system.