India's Supercomputer Journey

 India's Supercomputer journey is no less than an astounding achievement. In 1987, USA declined when India asked to purchase Supercomputers, developed by CRAY thinking India may develop nuclear weapon from it. The CRAY supercomputer, designated No. 1205 by Cray, was built for the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore but it was never delivered. At a conference at CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), in 1987, Rajiv Gandhi was discussing this problem with many renowned Indian scientists. They expressed their discontent on the PM asking other countries to setup India’s supercomputer. DoE established the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with initial investment of Rs 300 million produced PARAM 8000 supercomputer in 1991. Dr. Vijay P. Bhatkar is known as Father of PARAM Series Supercomputer. Indian scientists developed their supercomputer by linking together as many as 256 small, readily available computers in a technique known as massive parallel processing. 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 truly being a supercomputer. That’s when Bhatkar decided to take the PARAM prototype to a major international conference and exhibition of supercomputers. Here, it was demonstrated, benchmarked and formally declared a supercomputer at "Zürich Supercomputing Show". A US Newspapers published the news with headline, “Denied supercomputer, Angry India does it!” Most important, In 1993 the PARAM 9000 series of supercomputers is 28 times more powerful than the Cray that India had agreed to buy, but far less powerful than the most advanced Cray models. Dr. Bhatkar went on to lead CDAC to create ‘PARAM 10000’- India’s third Supercomputer in 1998. He also built National Param Super-computing Facility (NPSF) which now functions as the foundation to High Performance Computing (HPC) in India. PARAM Padma (2002), 1 TeraFlop Supercomputer became first Indian supercomputer to enter TOP500 list with 171st position. PARAM Yuva, 54 Teraflop SuperComputer in 2008 was featured at 69th position of TOP500 November 2008 edition. PARAM Yuva 2, a 529 Teraflop SuperComputer in 2013 was at 69th position in TOP500 June 2013 edition. The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. PARAM BioBlaze was launched on Feb 2014 with peak compute power of 10.65 Teraflops, to mitigate challenges in Bio-Informatics. Installed at IIT Guwahati, PARAM Ishan can be used in the application areas like computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, computational electromagnetic, civil engineering structures, nano-block self assemble, climate modelling and seismic data processing. PARAM Kanchenjunga, 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. Interestingly, Param in Sanskrit means ‘supreme’! IIT-M and C-DAC have developed 2 microprocessors named SHAKTI (32-bit) and VEGA (64-bit) respectively under open source architecture under aegis of “Microprocessor Development Programme” of Ministry of Electronics and IT (MEITY). “National SuperComputing Mission” was launched in 2015 with a budget of ₹4500 crore. In 2019, C-DAC manufactured PARAM SHIVAY for IIT-BHU with 837 Teraflops computational power at an cost of ₹32.5 crore. 2nd SuperComputer PARAM SHIVAY was launched for IIT KGP with peak computing power of 1.66 PetaFlops. 3rd one of this series is PARAM BRAHMA (797 TeraFlops) for IISER Pune. NVIDIA said on 2020 that the C-DAC will commission India’s largest HPC-AI supercomputer, ‘PARAM Siddhi – AI’. With Rpeak of 5.267 Petaflops and 4.6 Petaflops Rmax (Sustained), this computer debuted at 62nd place in TOP500 Nov 2020 edition.