IT Minister Kapil Sibal has forwarded a proposal to Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh to develop the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2017, government official revealed.

According to the official, who was speaking on the condition of anonymity, the IT ministry has prepared a blueprint to create a supercomputer that would be 61 times faster than the world’s current fastest computer – the IBM Sequoia.

The blueprint to build petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers has reportedly been created by C-DAC, which also estimated that the supercomputer would cost around Rs. 4700 crores to be built.

Speaking about the plan, the official said, “He (Sibal) 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 petaflop is a gauge of a computer’s processing speed. A petaflop is equal to 1000 trillion floating point operations per second, and an exaflop is one thousand times faster than a petaflop.

IBM developed Sequoia is currently the world’s fastest computer, with a performance speed of 16.32 petaflops.

India’s existing fastest supercomputer, which is situated at CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling & Computer Simulation, stands at 58th spot in the list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers.