The government of India has said that it is planning to install a total of 70 supercomputers in the country during the coming years.

Government officials said that the supercomputers will allow the country to carry out research in different fields including climate, defence and other areas. They will allow high-level research in different fields, enabling not only the government agencies but also the private sector to take benefits of the research infrastructure. Scientific and research community affiliated with the government institutions will be allowed to use the supercomputers for research purpsoes.

These supercomputers will have the capacityof half petaflop to 20 petaflop but when the project is completed, the speed will rise to 50 petaflop. The petaflop is a measure of a computer's processing speed and is described as thousand trillion floating point operations per second. The computers will be used in diverse fields including defence simulation, computing, biology and material science and earth science

Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary of Department of Science and Technology, said, "The project, which costs around Rs 4,500 crore is in its nascent stage. It will come up with association of the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Information and Technology. These supercomputers will be in different parts of country."

The government has already stated modalities for the project and it is expected to be operational by the year 2022.