Beginning the second phase of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), an MoU was signed between its Director Dr. Hemant Darbari also the Director-General of C-DAC with Host Institutes in presence of Sanjay Dhotre, Union Minister for Education and Communication. The MoU is a step towards attaining self-reliance in supercomputing and manufacturing of critical components in India, establishing Supercomputing Infrastructure with Assembly and Manufacturing of Critical Components at different eminent educational institutions.

Phase 2 will take 7 years to finish establishing a National Knowledge Network connecting 70 national research and academic institutions. The MoU signing was attended by Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY, Prof Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, DST, Jyoti Arora, Special Secretary & FA, MeitY, Dr. Rajendra Kumar, Additional Secretary, MeitY, senior officials from the Department of Science & Technology, MeitY, C-DAC & Host Institutes. The facilities will be coming up at IISC Bangalore, IITs at Kanpur, Roorkee, Hyderabad, Guwahati, Mandi, Gandhinagar, NIT Trichy, NABI Mohali, NSM Nodal Centres. The training facilities in HPC & AI will be set up at IIT Madras, Kharagpur, Goa, and Palakkad.

Digitalization and self-reliance have been a rudimentary part of the government policy. Sanjay Dhotre extrapolates that the Government’s primary intention is to “provide necessary computational power to Academia, Industry, Scientific and Research Community”. This MOU would also greatly help the MSME and the startups in their day to day struggle and crisis. In the first phase of NSM with a budget of ₹4500 Crore C-DAC has already established Supercomputing Ecosystem in IIT BHU Varanasi, IIT Kharagpur, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Research Bengaluru and IIS, and Education & Research Pune.

The primary goal is to develop its own indigenous hardware encompassing all the intricacies that comes with it. The accelerating pace of research and innovation using computational science techniques with manufacturing Critical Supercomputing components in India is an important step towards AtmanirbharBharat Abhiyan, following the clarion call by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.