SINGAPORE, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Singapore's Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat announced on Tuesday that the city-state will invest 200 million Singapore dollars (about 147.34 million U.S. dollars) in supporting the next phase of supercomputing development.

He said at the opening of the Supercomputing Asia 2019 conference that the National Research Foundation will allocate the fund under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2020 plan to upgrade both Singapore's supercomputing capability, network speed and quality for access by all institutions of higher learning and research institutions.

According to the minister, Singapore sees value in supercomputing, as it helps the country address some of its national challenges. He said that high performance computing can play a key role in Singapore's transforming all its industries, sector by sector, systematically, and search for new engines of growth, which will be key to the city-state's future economy.

Heng said the 200 million Singapore dollars of fund will be used to provide 15-20 petaflops of high-end compute performance, which will help Singapore meet the growing needs of national research and education programs, and enable the country to tap into other international research platforms as it collaborates with the international partners.

"This investment is critical," he said. "As we embark on our journey as a Smart Nation, and digitalize our economy, we must upgrade our supercomputing resources, to keep up with our partners globally and to solve complex national challenges more quickly and effectively."