Supercomputer in India



Param Padma, Made in India Supercomputer

Recently there has been news in media that India is planning to build a Supercomputer by 2017 that will be 61 times faster than the fastest of today. The fastest Supercomputer of today is IBMs ‘Sequoia’ with ‘peak performance’ speed 16.32 PetaFLOPS which is at ‘Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’, USA. If the goal is achieved India will be quite ahead of the time because it’s a trend that the speed of supercomputer gets doubled at an average of every 14 months and by that trend we can expect the speed of
 supercomputer at the end of 2017 to be around 500 PetaFLOPS. But the Indian machine will be almost of ExaFLOPS speed.

Now let’s have some talks about Supercomputer and Supercomputer in India.

 A super computer is a type of computer that can perform a huge number of mathematical calculations with immense speed. It is used mainly in scientific researches (such as nuclear research), weather forecasting etc. The main difference between a ‘supercomputer’ and a ‘mainframe computer’ is that a mainframe computer uses its power to execute many programs simultaneously whereas a supercomputer uses all its power to execute few programs very fast. The speed of a supercomputer is now measured by ‘TeraFLOPS’ or ‘PetaFLOPS’. ‘FLOPS’ is actually abbreviation of ‘floating point operation per second’ which is a measure of computers performance. One “PetaFLOPS”   means one thousand trillion FLOPS.

Cray series Supercomputer

Seymour Roger Cray (28 September, 1925 – 5 October, 1996) may be called the father of Supercomputer. ‘CDC 6600’, released in 1964, is generally considered as the first Supercomputer of the world. In the 1970s Cray setup is own company, 'Cray Computer Corporation'. The Supercomputers manufactured in this company are known as 'Cray seies Supercomputers'.

It’s very amazing that the popular computer operating system ‘Windows’ has no entry in the arena of supercomputers. The early supercomputer operating systems were tailor made but since the end of 20^th century ‘Linux’ is used as operating system of super computers. The present fastest supercomputer ‘Sequoia’ runs with two Linux OSs, ‘Computer Node Linux’ on over 98,000 nodes, and ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux’ running on 768 I/O nodes that are connected to the filesystem.


Supercomputers of 1980s and earlier used only few processors. In the first Indian Supercomputer ‘Param 8000’ only 64 processors were used but in modern Supercomputers more than hundred thousand processors are being used.

A list of world’s top 500 Supercomputer is maintained based on their LINPACK Benchmarks results. In that list India’s fastest Supercomputer of today is listed at #58 which is installed at ‘CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation’.

SAGA 220

If you have become quite interested about Supercomputer and thinking of purchasing one for your game-console here is some other facts about it. A modern Supercomputer requires almost a warehouse size space. There, you will find several (in ‘Sequoia’ it is 96) tall refrigerator-like cabinets interconnected with optic fiber cables. It requires huge amount of electricity (few Megawatts) to run a Supercomputer, besides a special cooling system is essential to absorb the heat generated from the machine. This cooling system also consumes huge electricity. Now about the price of a Supercomputer; as Supercomputers are not sold in supermarkets it’s very difficult to speak about its market price still I am trying to give you an idea. The total project cost of what I’ve started this article with is Rs. 4,700 crores. Rather be specific; ‘SAGA-220’ (220 TeraFLOPS speed) is a Supercomputer built by  ‘Indian Space Research Organisation’ (ISSRO) in 2011, installed at ‘Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre’ (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram costs about Rs. 14 crores. I think this was quite cheap model (by price).

Indians should feel pride over the fact that India was among the pioneers regarding Supercomputer. The history is quite interesting. Till eighties USA was the only country who had supercomputing technology. USSR was trying to achieve it. Other technological giants, Japan, West Germany etc. were far away from it. In the mid eighties India urged to purchase a Cray series Supercomputer from USA for using in meteorological forecasting and other scientific researches. Then it was the era of cold-war. After much negotiation USA actually denied to handover the technology to India by imposing several humiliating conditions. The underlying fear was that India might use the supercomputing technology for developing nuclear weapons. Then Indian scientists and technologists took the challenge of “Made in India” Supercomputer. For this purpose a new institution was set up in 1988 by the name “Centre for Development of Advanced Computing” (C-DAC). The success came within two years; in 1990 first prototype of Indian Supercomputer was built. It was named ‘Param’ (Parallel Machine), the word ‘Param’ is Sanskrit in origin and it means ‘The Supreme’. The prototype was benchmarked at the 1990 Zurich Supercomputer Show. India became second after USA. In 1991 the first full-fledged Indian Supercomputer, ‘Param 8000’ was installed. It had a speed of 1 GigaFLOPS.

Here there is another interesting story. Initially nobody was ready to accept that the machine India had made was actually a Supercomputer. Even some scientists attached to this project were not much confident of it. Because ‘Param’ didn’t look like a Supercomputer known till then and its architecture was also quite different. But all doubts ended when it was benchmarked at Zurich and it surpassed most of the machines produced in the show.



The chief protagonists of India’s success of building first indigenously made Supercomputer: Ronald Wilson Reagan, the then President of USA, if he handed over the Supercomputer technology to India easily Indian scientists and technologists might not have taken the challenge, Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, who had shown the foresight and approved the C-DAC project and Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, the first chief of C-DAC, who may be called the father of Indian Supercomputer.

After ‘Param 8000’ C-DAC has released several versions of Supercomputer which are popularly known as “Param’ series; ‘Param 8600’, ‘Param 9900/SS’, ‘Param 9900/AA’, ‘Param 9900/US’, ‘Param 10000’, ‘Param Padma’, ‘Param Yuva’, ‘Param Net’ and ‘Param NetII’. Initially India was denied the technology but India herself exported several Made In India Supercomputer to different countries, some of them are even developed countries such as Germany, Singapore and Russia.

In spite of being one of the pioneers in Supercomputer technology India is presently lagging in the race. Some countries such as Japan and China have made great leap over the last two decades. Let us see whether India can regain her position with the new project.