India's 'Supreme' Digital Dawning
It takes a lot of work to build a supercomputer. It is seen as the pinnacle of human efforts in artificial computing for a reason.
One man (Mr. Seymour Cray) started the entire
supercomputer revolution but it took a 'supremely' superhuman effort to produce
our first Indigenous Supercomputer.
Who undertook the effort you ask? Mr. Vijay Pandurang
Bhatkar, the father of modern Indian Computing..
It all started in the late 1980's. The only supercomputer available at the time was Cray-1, owned by the Americans. The Americans feared that if India got their hands on this powerful technology, it would only be a matter of time before we challenged their might in major fields of satellite communication and nuclear weapons. Hence an embargo was placed on Cray computers being sold to India.
You know what they say, Necessity is the mother of Invention right?
India was not deterred and under PM Rajiv Gandhi, India set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in March 1988 with the clear mandate to develop an indigenous supercomputer to meet high-speed computational needs in solving scientific and other developmental problems where fast number crunching was a major component.
Every major project needs a mastermind and for this
particular one, our PM turned to Mr. Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar.
There was only one issue. He had only seen a
supercomputer in pictures before and had no actual experience with them. But he
assured the PM that he would get it done, quicker than they could import it
from the US and cheaper than what they were asking for it! Talk about
confidence. The rest as we say, is history..
In a mindbogglingly small period of 3 years, we were ready to launch our first Supercomputer, the PARAM 8000 to the world in 1991. It was a monumental achievement. We were now on the global map of supercomputing, by providing an able competitor at an exceptionally low price and impressive capability.
The global computing arena was sceptical about the
performance of PARAM. After all, we weren't major players in
this field in any way previously.
So what does our Mr.Bhatkar do?
He took the PARAM prototype to a major international conference and exhibition of supercomputers where it was demonstrated, benchmarked and formally declared a supercomputer. A US Newspapers headline the next day read, “Denied supercomputer, Angry India does it!”
This set the stage for India to churn out the PARAM series of supercomputers over the next few decades.
These include:
PARAM 8000, India's 1st Giga-scale supercomputer in
1990
PARAM 10000, 100 Gigaflop supercomputer in 1998
PARAM Padma, 1Teraflop supercomputer in 2002. This was
India's first supercomputer to enter the Top 500 list of supercomputers of the
world (ranked 171 in June 2003)
PARAM Yuva, a 54 Teraflop supercomputer in 2008
(ranked 69 in November 2008)
PARAM Yuva II, a 529 Teraflop supercomputer in 2013
(ranked 69 in June 2013)
PARAM Biochrome is an HPC cluster for Bioinformatics
applications. The cluster has a compute capacity of 5 TeraFlops
PARAM Bio Blaze: A supercomputing facility with peak compute power of 10.65 TF, was launched on February 18, 2014 to address the challenges in bioinformatics
Applications :
The PARAM Series supercomputers are used to perform a
number of scientific and engineering applications. Some of their applications
are:
1. Atmospheric Science: PARAM 10000 has been
utilized for design and development of weather and climate monitoring. A PARAM
10000 has been installed at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather
Forecasting (NCMRWF) for the purpose of weather forecasting. CDAC is developing
a technology which will be ported on the PARAM series of parallel computers and
will offer a solution to long range area weather modelling.
2. Seismic Data Processing: Seismic data
processing means large amount of data processing. It includes modelling
algorithms. These modelling and migration algorithms have been used by Oil and
Natural Gas Corporation Ltd. (ONGC), for processing oil exploration data sets.
3. Computational Fluid Dynamics: India's first
supercomputer, PARAM 8000, was used for fluid mechanics and structural
analysis. It was further optimized by CDAC and installed at the Institute of
Computer Aided Design (ICAD), Moscow. Later versions of PARAM are used for
designing new aerodynamically efficient vehicles.
4. Basic Sciences: In the field of Basic
Sciences, Materials and Molecular Modelling require very high computing
performance. This need is fulfilled by PARAM
The PARAM story is just one among many of our great technological success stories as a nation.
"Great Nations are not built on borrowed technology" - Vijay Bhatkar.
In 2015, Mr. Bhushan was awarded the Padma Bhushan for his contribution to Indian technology..
Mr. Bhatkar, along with C-DAC changed that way the
world viewed India and changed the way we approached the 21st century as a
nation. We hope that this inspires more youngsters to defy the odds and do
exceptional things in their lives. For the future of this country is in the
hands of the youth.
Jai Hind everyone and wishing everyone a Happy 74th
Independence Day from IEEE SIT SB!
🤩🤩🔥🔥
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