Here is the story of how India’s first-ever indigenous supercomputer was made, a major milestone in modern India’s technological odyssey.

The supercomputer effort in India began in the late 1980s, when the US stopped the export of a Cray supercomputer because of continuing technology embargoes.

During the 80s, USA had developed super computers, which were critical for developing satellites and nuclear weapons. These countries refused to transfer the knowledge of creating super computers to India, fearing the developing nation might use it to design missiles and warplanes rather than forecast the weather.

Following a specific recommendation of the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (SAC-PM) to that effect, C-DAC was established as a scientific society of the then Department of Electronics (now the Department of Information Technology (DIT) under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology).

To lead the project, PM Rajiv Gandhi turned to a man who hadn’t seen a 'super' all his life to build one in double-quick time. But Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar knew all about shortcuts: the country’s top number-cruncher had begun school directly in the 4th standard and still made it to the top. When Rajiv Gandhi met Bhatkar, he asked him three questions:

"Can we do it?"
Bhatkar answered, "I have not seen a supercomputer as we have no access to supercomputer, I have only seen a picture of the Cray! But, yes, we can."

"How long will it take?"
Bhatkar promptly replied, "Less than it it will take us in trying to import Cray from US."

"How much money it would take?"
Bhatkar replied, "The whole effort, including building an institution, developing the technology, commissioning and installing India’s first supercomputer will cost less than the cost of Cray."

Pleased, the Prime Minister gave the go-ahead for the project. Based in Pune, C-DAC summoned scientists from all over the country to work on one of India’s greatest technology projects.

Within three years, the extraordinary happened. With everyone involved working their socks off, C-DAC finally completed its work well within the proposed deadline. With components that could be bought off the shelves, in 1991, C-DAC rolled out India’s first indigenous supercomputer: PARAM 8000.

For the first time ever, a developing country had pulled off such a feat in advanced computer development. Needless to say, the world was shocked at this achievement.

Many were doubtful about PARAM 8000 truly being a supercomputer. That’s when Bhatkar decided to take the param prototype to a major international conference and exhibition of supercomputers at 1990 Zurich Supercomputering Show. In the show it surpassed most other systems, placing India second after US.

A US Newspaper The Washington Post published the news with headline, "Denied supercomputer, Angry India does it!"

A multiprocessor machine, param 8000 was benchmarked at 5 Gflops, making it the second fastest supercomputer in the world at that time.

At that time India was the third country in the world after USA and Japan with the capability to develop supercomputers.

PARAM 8000 also costed a fraction of what the legendary US machine Cray did and performed just as well. So much so, that the US company which manufactured Cray had to slash prices to woo a nation it spurned just eight years ago!

List of PARAM series supercomputers

1.PARAM 8000

Unveiled in 1991, PARAM 8000 used Inmos T800 transputers. It was architectted by Vijay Bhatkar and was a fairly new and innovative microprocessor architecture designed for parallel processing at the time. It was a distributed memory MIMD architecture with a reconfigurable interconnection network. It had 64 CPUs. Exported to Germany, UK and Russia.

2.PARAM 8600

PARAM 8600 was an improvement over PARAM 8000. It was a 256 CPU computer. For every four Inmos T800, it employed an Intel i860 coprocessor.The result was over 5 GFLOPS at peak for vector processing. Several of these models were exported.

3.PARAM 9900/SS

PARAM 9900/SS was designed to be a MPP system. It used the SuperSPARC II processor. The design was changed to be modular so that newer processors could be easily accommodated. Typically, it used 32-40 processors. But, it could be scaled up to 200 CPUs using the clos network topology.PARAM 9900/US was the UltraSPARC variant and PARAM 9900/AA was the DEC Alpha variant.

4.PARAM 10000

In 1998, the PARAM 10000 was unveiled. PARAM 10000 used several independent nodes, each based on the Sun Enterprise 250 server and each such server contained two 400Mhz UltraSPARC II processors. The base configuration had three compute nodes and a server node. The peak speed of this base system was 6.4 GFLOPS. A typical system would contain 160 CPUs and be capable of 100 GFLOPS But, it was easily scalable to the TFLOP range. Exported to Russia and Singapore.

5.PARAM Padma

PARAM Padma (Padma means Lotus in Sanskrit) was introduced in April 2003.It had a peak speed of 1024 GFLOPS (about 1 TFLOP) and a peak storage of 1 TB. It used 248 IBM Power4 CPUs of 1 GHz each. The operating system was IBM AIX 5.1L. It used PARAMnet II as its primary interconnect.It was the first Indian supercomputer to break the 1 TFLOP barrier.

6.PARAM Yuva

PARAM Yuva (Yuva means Youth in Sanskrit) was unveiled in November 2008. It is the latest machine in the series of PARAM. It has a maximum sustainable speed (Rmax) of 38.1 TFLOPS and a peak speed (Rpeak) of 54 TFLOPS. There are 4608 cores in it, based on Intel 73XX of 2.9 GHz each. It has a storage capacity of 25 TB up to 200 TB.It uses PARAMnet 3 as its primary interconnect.

7.Param Yuva II

Param Yuva II was made by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in a period of three months, at a cost of ₹16 crore (US$2 million), and was unveiled on 8 February 2013. It performs at a peak of 524 teraflops and consumes 35% less energy as compared to Param Yuva. It delivers sustained performance of 360.8 teraflops on the community standard Linpack benchmark, and would have been ranked 62 in the November 2012 ranking list of Top500. In terms of power efficiency, it would have been ranked 33rd in the November 2012 List of Top Green500 supercomputers of the world.It is the first Indian supercomputer achieving more than 500 teraflops.

Param Yuva II will be used for research in space, bioinformatics, weather forecasting, seismic data analysis, aeronautical engineering, scientific data processing and pharmaceutical development. Educational institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology can be linked to the computer through the national knowledge network. This computer is a stepping stone towards building the future petaflop-range supercomputers in India.

8. PARAM ISHAN

It is capable of 15 TFLOPS speed and can be used in the application areas like computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, computational electromagnetic, civil engineering structures, nano-block self assemble, climate modeling and seismic data processing.

9.PARAM Kanchenjunga

It is capable of 250 TFLOPS speed and is stationed at NIT Sikkim’s Supercomputing Centre, is expected to be used for engineering research conducted by the faculty and students at the institute as well as researchers across the state.

PARAM series Supercomputers have been exported to many countries like Russia, Singapore, Germany, Canada, Tanzania, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Ghana, Myanmar, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam etc

India working on building worlds fastest supercomputer with speed of 132 exaflops per second

Top science centres in the country like Isro, IISc and select IITs have started work on a mission to build and run the fastest supercomputer that will work at exaflops per second, faster than the current Petaflops performance worldwide.

There is no exaflop supercomputer in the world yet and the first one is expected to emerge around 2019-2020, which is exactly when India has planned to launch its own.

India’s proposed new supercomputer is set to work at 132 exaflops per second as against an 1 exaflops per second machine being built by Cray Incorporated, the iconic American computer company which has projected that its machine would be ready by 2020.

for the layman
1 petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) means 10 to the power 15 floating-point operations per second
1 exaFLOPS (EFLOPS) means 10 to the power 18 floating-point operations per second

Sunway TaihuLight 93 PFLOPS i.e. 93 x 10 to the power 15 floating-point operations per second (fastest as of 2016)

US cray inc is working on 1 EFLOPS supercomputer i.e. 1 x 10 to the power 18 floating-point operations per second (to be ready by 2020)

india is working on 132 EFLOPS supercomputer i.e. 132 x 10 to the power 18 floating-point operations per second (to be ready by 2021-2 )


The IISc-Isro project has the backing of the Centre which has set aside 2 billion dollars for its development, apart from support to the other major initiative of having 100-150 supercomputers at the local, district and national levels under a national programme.

Prof N Balakrishnan, Profe­ssor at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) and Associate Director, IISc, told Deccan Herald: “The world does not have an exaflop supercomputer yet. The first one is to come up around 2019. Research work on exaflops is underway at IISC, Isro and a few IITs and C-DAC for India’s own proposed exaflop supercomputer. It is a collective project and scientists from around the country are involved in it.”

But what India’s science institutions are working on is no easy task, with the senior professor expressing caution about the project. “Taking up research on exaflops itself is a big step. An exaflop machine is not only hard to build, but it is also very difficult to just run it. The system requires a level of energy way above normal levels. We need to have energy-efficient systems in place to build and run this machine. Higher the energy consumed, higher the costs. Good system and energy management will be crucial in cutting down costs.”

Vikkie14:
Got your mention Nemesis. Hopefully you got that sorted out.

Saw ur mail nothing in it , just message to contact you in ur nairaland profile

We can talk here if u want

And delete the posts after that

Meanwhile down here our govt is still commissioning brigdes and boreholes.

Did you received my reply to your earlier comment?

X

.

Ekejoestar:
Meanwhile down here our govt is still commissioning brigdes and boreholes.

the average Nigerian work only for his stomach

Vikkie14



Don't forget to notify me when u send the mail

nemesis8u:


Ok

Don't forget to notify me when u send the mail

Should have gotten to you, but can't find where I penned the mail.
You can retype that please.

Vikkie14:

Should have gotten to you, but can't find where I penned the mail.
You can retype that please.

Check above

nemesis8u:


Check above

Seen.

nemesis8u:
Don't forget to notify me when u send the mail

You can check your mail.

Vikkie14

Replied

Vikkie14:
You can check your mail.

I replied yesterday did u receive it ?

nemesis8u:


I replied yesterday did u receive it ?

Received. I've replied as well. Thank you very much.

Vikkie14:
Received. I've replied as well. Thank you very much.

I will check

No problem

nemesis8u:


I will check

No problem

Did you received it?

Vikkie14:
Did you received it?

Yes long time back

Read it , but due to circumstances could not confirm here

Sorry

nemesis8u:


Sorry

No qualms.
Noticed you went AWOL after the Chinese-Indian brouhaha.
Hope you're good now bro?

U