National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

What is the National Supercomputing Mission?

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) is a national programme launched in April 2015 with an outlay of Rs 4,500 crore to build indigenous supercomputing capability and give Indian researchers access to high performance computing at scale. NSM is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

According to the DST NSM page, the mission is "a first of its kind attempt to boost the country's computing power", serving academia, researchers, MSMEs and startups.

Key objectives

• Give Indian researchers state-of-the-art supercomputing capacity domestically instead of relying on foreign facilities.
• Build indigenous hardware and software capability. The mission has produced the Rudra server line and indigenous HPC software stacks.
• Address national grand-challenge problems in climate modelling, drug discovery, materials science, astrophysics and disaster management.
• Train a workforce capable of using and building HPC systems.

Main features

• 37 supercomputers commissioned with roughly 39–40 petaflops of combined capacity, per DST's update dated 30 November 2025.
• Systems deployed in three tiers: 11 high-end systems above 1 petaflop, 12 mid-range systems between 500 teraflops and 1 petaflop, and 14 low-end systems below 500 teraflops.
• Deployment reaches beyond metros into Tier-II and Tier-III city institutions.
• A dedicated user creation portal through which individual researchers request compute time.

Who can use National Supercomputing Mission facilities?

You can apply if:

• You are a researcher, faculty member, research scholar or student at an Indian academic or research institution.
• You have an official institutional email address. The NSM user creation portal states plainly that personal accounts are not accepted.
• You can obtain endorsement from your Head of Department or Principal Investigator, who must verify your details.
• You are working on a defined research problem that needs HPC resources. DST also names MSMEs and startups among the mission's intended users.

You cannot apply if:

• You have no institutional email address, registration cannot proceed past the first step.
• You cannot secure HoD or PI endorsement, since the verification stage requires it.
• Your institute is not a recognised host or user institute under the mission's allocation policy.

Allocation is not automatic even for eligible users. The access page states that allocation decisions "are made by C-DAC and the Host Institute per their policies", capacity is finite and prioritised by scientific merit and need.

What has the National Supercomputing Mission delivered?

DST's NSM page records the following, as of 30 November 2025:

Named systems in the PARAM family include PARAM Siddhi, PARAM Pravega at IISc Bengaluru with 3.3 petaflops of capacity, PARAM Ganga at IIT Roorkee, PARAM Shakti and PARAM Rudra. Beyond installed systems, the mission has produced indigenous Rudra servers and HPC software stacks, shifting India from purchasing supercomputers to building them.

MeitY's Digital India release notes that the mission's term was extended to 31 December 2025.

What documents are required for NSM access?

How to apply for access to NSM PARAM systems

1. Go to the NSM user creation portal linked from the Access to PARAM Systems page at nsmindia.in.
2. Register with your official institutional email address, along with your city and institute name. Personal email accounts are not accepted.
3. Verify your email using the confirmation message sent to that address. You then receive a link to complete the detailed registration form.
4. Complete the user creation form with your research details, the resources you need and your supervising faculty member.
5. Upload the required documents — identity proof, the signed user creation form and any supporting papers. Note that once documents are submitted, no further edits are possible because the record enters verification.
6. Wait for verification by your Head of Department or Principal Investigator and then by the host institute.
7. On approval, collect your HPC system credentials and log in to the allocated PARAM system.

If you get stuck at any stage, write to nsmsupport@cdac.in, the support address published on the access page.

How do I get HPC training under NSM?

NSM runs a Human Resource Development (HRD) programme alongside the hardware deployment, and DST reports 27,500 people trained in high performance computing under the mission. Training is delivered through a network of nodal centres attached to participating institutions, covering parallel programming, GPU computing and domain-specific HPC applications.

Details of upcoming programmes, and the contact list for nodal centres, are published under the HRD section of nsmindia.in.

What research does NSM support?

NSM compute has been used across weather and climate modelling, computational biology and drug discovery, materials and molecular simulation, astrophysics, computational fluid dynamics, and increasingly artificial intelligence workloads. The mission's own framing is about "addressing grand challenges"; problems whose computational demand exceeds what a single laboratory cluster can handle.

The scale figure worth internalising is the 1.28 crore computational jobs already executed. NSM is not a showcase installation; it is a working national research utility.

What did NSM build indigenously?

NSM was structured in three phases, and the distinction between them explains why the mission matters beyond a count of machines. The early phase assembled systems largely from imported components. Later phases moved progressively towards design and manufacture in India, producing the indigenous Rudra server line along with HPC software stacks developed by C-DAC.

DST describes this as part of the mission's vision "to achieve self-reliance and global leadership in supercomputing". The practical consequence for a researcher is continuity: capacity built on indigenous hardware is not exposed to export controls or vendor withdrawal in the way an imported system can be.

Deployment has also been deliberately distributed. Alongside installations at IISc, the IITs and central R&D laboratories, NSM systems have gone into academic institutions in Tier-II and Tier-III cities, so a researcher outside the metros can access national-scale compute without relocating.

Common reasons NSM access requests stall

• Personal email used at registration. The portal accepts only official institutional addresses, and a Gmail or Yahoo address will not pass step one.
• HoD or PI verification pending. Registration moves to your Head of Department or Principal Investigator for confirmation; requests sit here longer than anywhere else in the process.
• Documents submitted with errors. The access page warns that once documents are submitted "no further edits can be made, as the documents enters into a verification process". Check everything before you submit.
• Weak resource justification. Allocation is decided by C-DAC and the host institute against finite capacity, so a vague project description competes poorly against a specific one stating expected core-hours and workload type.
• Host institute policy mismatch. Each host institute applies its own allocation policy alongside C-DAC's, and priority typically goes to users affiliated with that institute.

Where to get help with NSM

• NSM support desk: nsmsupport@cdac.in
• DST NSM team lead: Dr Pratishtha T Pandey, Scientist-G and Head, phone 011-26590452
• NSM portal: nsmindia.in, access requests, calls for proposals, nodal centres and HRD programmes
• DST NSM page: dst.gov.in; mission status and deployment figures

A note on sourcing: MeitY's own website blocks automated retrieval, so the figures in this guide were verified against the Department of Science and Technology's NSM page, the nsmindia.in access portal, and the MeitY press release republished on the Digital India portal.