India to Develop Fastest Supercomputer by 2017; 61 Times Faster than Sequoia

India plans to develop the next generation computer which is 61 times faster than the current fastest super computer, IBM Sequoia, over the next five years.

According to Press Trust of India (PTI), the government hopes to unveil the "petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers" which will be developed at an estimated cost of ₹47 billion by 2017. Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal is said to have written a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh citing the plans and roadmaps of the proposed supercomputer.

"In his (Sibal) letter, he has said that C-DAC has developed a proposal with a roadmap to develop a petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers in the country with an outlay of Rs 4,700 crore," a government official said to the news agency.

In his letter written to PM, Sibal also cited the record of Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) which was set up in 1987.He also made a proposal to the government to allow the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) to oversee all activities of supercomputing in the country.

"The Minister has written that C-DAC developed first supercomputers in the country, the PARAM series. Presently Param Yuva with 54 teraflop computing power is serving many researchers through Garuda Computing Grid," PTI quoted the official as saying.

Sequoia, which is currently the world's fastest super computer, runs on Linux with over 98,000 nodes on Compute Node Linux and has a registered speed of 16.32 PFLOPS. It was fully developed by June this year by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration for the primary purpose of nuclear weapons simulation.