Supercomputing in India has a history going back to the 1980s. The

Government of India The Government of India (ISO: ; often abbreviated as GoI), known as the Union Government or Central Government but often simply as the Centre, is the national government of the Republic of India, a federal democracy located in South Asia, c ...

created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s. when ranking by number of supercomputer systems in the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list, India is ranked at number 89 in the world, with the PARAM Siddhi-AI being the fastest supercomputer in India.

History

Early years

India had faced difficulties in the 1980s when trying to purchase supercomputers for academic and weather forecasting purposes. In 1986 the

National Aerospace Laboratories The National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) is India's first and largest aerospace research firm established by the CSIR India, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Delhi in 1959. The firm closely operates with Hindustan Aero ...

(NAL) started the Flosolver project to develop a computer for computational fluid dynamics and aerospace engineering. The Flosolver MK1, described as a parallel processing system, started operations in December 1986.

Indigenous development programme

In 1987 the Indian Government had requested to purchase a

Cray X-MP The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system performance ...

supercomputer; this request was denied by the United States government as the machine could have a dual use in weapons development. After this problem, in the same year, the Government of India decided to promote an indigenous supercomputer development programme. Multiple projects were commissioned from different groups including the

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is an Indian autonomous scientific society, operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. History CDAC was created in November 1987, initially as the Centre f ...

(C-DAC), the

Centre for Development of Telematics The Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) is an Indian Government owned telecommunications technology development centre. It was established in 1984 with initial mandate of designing and developing digital exchanges. C-DOT has expanded to ...

(C-DOT), the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), the

Bhabha Atomic Research Centre The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) is India's premier nuclear research facility, headquartered in Trombay, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It was founded by Homi Jehangir Bhabha as the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) in January 195 ...

(BARC), and the

Advanced Numerical Research and Analysis Group Advanced Numerical Research and Analysis Group (ANURAG) is a laboratory of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Located in Kanchanbagh, Hyderabad, it is involved in the development of computing solutions for numerical analys ...

(ANURAG). C-DOT created "CHIPPS": the C-DOT High-Performance Parallel Processing System. NAL had started to develop the Flosolver in 1986. BARC created the Anupam series of supercomputers. ANURAG created the PACE series of supercomputers.

C-DAC First Mission

The

(C-DAC) was created at some point between November 1987 and August 1988. C-DAC was given an initial 3 year budget of Rs375 million to create a 1000MFLOPS (1GFLOPS) supercomputer by 1991. C-DAC unveiled the

PARAM Param may refer to: *PARAM, a series of Indian supercomputers *Param (company), a video game developer *Param, Iran, a village in East Azerbaijan Province, Iran *Param, Mazandaran, a village in Mazandaran Province, Iran *Param, Chuuk, Micronesia, ...

8000 supercomputer in 1991. This was followed by the PARAM 8600 in 1992/1993. These machines demonstrated Indian technological prowess to the world and led to export success.

C-DAC Second Mission

The PARAM 8000 was considered a success for C-DAC in delivering a gigaFLOPS range parallel computer. From 1992 C-DAC undertook its "Second Mission" to deliver a 100 GFLOPS range computer by 1997/1998. The plan was to allow the computer to scale to 1 teraFLOPS. In 1993 the PARAM 9000 series of supercomputers was released, which had a peak computing power of 5 GFLOPS. In 1998 the PARAM 10000 was released; this had a sustained performance of 38 GFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark.

C-DAC Third Mission

The C-DAC's third mission was to develop a teraFLOPS range computer. The PARAM Padma was delivered in December 2002. This was the first Indian supercomputer to feature on a list of the world's fastest supercomputers, in June 2003.

Development by other groups in the early 2000s

By the early 2000s it was noted that only ANURAG, BARC, C-DAC and NAL were continuing development of their supercomputers. NAL's Flosolver had 4 subsequent machines built in its series. At the same time ANURAG continued to develop PACE, primarily based on SPARC processors.

12th Five Year Plan

The Indian Government has proposed to commit 2.5 billion USD to supercomputing research during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2012–2017). The project will be handled by

Indian Institute of Science The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is a public, deemed, research university for higher education and research in science, engineering, design, and management. It is located in Bengaluru, in the Indian state of Karnataka. The institute wa ...

(IISc),

Bangalore Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

. Additionally, it was later revealed that India plans to develop a supercomputer with processing power in the

exaflops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

range. It will be developed by

C-DAC The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is an Government of India, Indian autonomous scientific society, operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. History CDAC was created in November 1987, init ...

within the subsequent five years of approval.

National Supercomputing Mission

In 2015 the

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is an executive agency of the Union Government of the Republic of India. It was carved out of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology on 19 July 2016 as a standalon ...

announced a "National Supercomputing Mission" (NSM) to install 73 indigenous supercomputers throughout the country by 2022. This is a seven-year program worth $730 million (Rs. 4,500 crore). Whilst previously computer were assembled in India, the NSM aims to produce the components within the country. The NSM is being implemented by C-DAC and the

. The aim is to create a cluster of geographically-distributed high-performance computing centers linked over a high-speed network, connecting various academic and research institutions across India. This has been dubbed the "National Knowledge Network" (NKN). The mission involves both capacity and capability machines and includes standing up three petascale supercomputers. The first phase involved deployment of supercomputers which have 60% Indian components. The second phase machines are intended to have an Indian designed processor, with a completion date of April 2021. The third and final phase intends to deploy fully indigenous supercomputers, with an aimed speed of 45 petaFLOPS within the NKN. By October 2020, the first assembled in India supercomputer had been installed. The NSM hopes to have the manufacturing capability for indigenous production by December 2020.

Rankings

Current TOP500

there are 3 systems based in India on the

supercomputer list.

India's historical rank in TOP500

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Supercomputing In India Supercomputer sites Supercomputing Science and technology in India Information technology in India