Assess the progress of the National Supercomputing Mission in achieving self-reliance in high-performance computing. What challenges remain?

The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was launched in April 2015 with about ₹4,500 crore. DST and MeitY steer it jointly, and it follows a "build approach" in three steps: assembly → manufacturing → design [1]. Eleven years on, India has become self-reliant at the system level. It has not yet done so at the chip level or at global scale.

Progress towards self-reliance

• Scale-up: 40 systems with 68 PF of combined capacity had been deployed by September 2026 [1].
• Indigenous server: "Rudra" is India's first HPC-class server and matches global servers. It powers the PARAM Rudra systems in Pune, Delhi and Kolkata [2].
• Indigenous network: C-DAC built the Trinetra interconnect. Trinetra-A (100 Gbps) runs in the 1 PF PARAM Rudra at Pune. Trinetra-B (200 Gbps) is meant for a 20 PF system at Bengaluru [3]. C-DAC has also built Indian system software [4].
• Real demand: most systems are busy over 85% of the time, and many above 95%. They serve 10,000+ researchers from 200+ institutions [5].
• AI compute: AIRAWAT ranked 75th in the global TOP500 list at ISC 2023 [2].

Challenges that remain

• Chip dependence: India's own processor, AUM, is still being designed. It is based on Arm's Neoverse V2 platform and built with MosChip (India) and Socionext (Japan) [4]. Self-reliance therefore stops short of the chip.
• Missed targets: the mission was extended to 31 December 2025 [3]. Even so, only 40 of 50 systems and about 55% of the 123+ PF target exist [1]. No revised deadline has been made public.
• Scale gap: NSM systems average about 1.7 PF each. The world's fastest machine runs at about 2.19 EF, roughly 30 times all NSM capacity combined [1].
• Queues: when machines are busy over 95% of the time, new jobs wait. This hurts smaller colleges that have no computers of their own [5].
• Exascale lag: DST invited R&D-Exascale proposals in 2020 [6], but India's total capacity is still far below one exaflop.

Overall, NSM has moved India from assembling imported machines to designing its own servers, networks and software. This is real self-reliance, but only partial. Three steps can close the gap: a revised time-bound plan, putting AUM into Rudra servers quickly with help from the India Semiconductor Mission, and buying capacity only for urgent needs. Supercomputers are critical infrastructure [1], so this layered path serves Aatmanirbhar Bharat and SDG 9 (resilient infrastructure and innovation).