Supercomputing in India has a history going back to the 1980s. The Government of India created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign supercomputers. , the AIRAWAT supercomputer is the fastest supercomputer in India, having been ranked 188th fastest in the world in the TOP500 supercomputer list. AIRAWAT has been installed at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune.
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 (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 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 (C-DAC), the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), and the Advanced Numerical Research and Analysis Group (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 Rs 375 million to create a 1000MFLOPS (1GFLOPS) supercomputer by 1991. C-DAC unveiled the PARAM 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. Param 8000 was replicated and installed at ICAD Moscow in 1991 with Russian collaboration.
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 US$2.5 billion to supercomputing research during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2012–2017). The project will be handled by Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Additionally, it was later revealed that India plans to develop a supercomputer with processing power in the exaflops range. It will be developed by C-DAC within the subsequent five years of approval.
National Supercomputing Mission
In 2015 the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology 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 Indian Institute of Science.
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.
A total of 24.83 petaFLOPS of High Performance Computing (HPC) machines were put into service between 2019 and 2023. In addition to 5,930 specialists from more than 100 institutes using the newly constructed facilities, 1.75 lakh (175,000) people received training in HPCs. A total of 73.25 lakh (7.325 million) computational high performance queries were run. Seven systems with processing power greater than one petaFLOPS, eight systems with computational capacities between 500 teraFLOPS and 1 petaFLOPS, and thirteen systems with capacities between 50 teraFLOPS and 500 teraFLOPS were installed during this time.
Rankings
Current TOP500 , there are 5 systems in India in the TOP500 supercomputer list.
Rank Site Name Rmax(PFlop/s) Rpeak(PFlop/s) 188 Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) AIRAWAT – PSAI 8.50 13.17 196 Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology Arka 5.94 7.40 251 National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting Arunika 5.94 7.40 338 Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology Pratyush (Cray XC40) 3.76 4.01 469 Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology Arka AI/ML 2.70 3.75 500+ National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting Mihir (Cray XC40) 2.57 2.81
India's historical rank in TOP500 + Rank of Indian supercomputers in TOP500 listListNumber of systemsin TOP500System Share (%)Total Rmax(Gflops)Total Rpeak(Gflops)Cores 2020 June 2 0.4 6,334,340 6,814,886 202,824 2019 November 2 0.4 6,334,340 6,814,886 202,824 2019 June 3 0.6 7,457,490 8,228,006 241,224 2018 November 4 0.8 8,358,996 9,472,166 272,328 2018 June 5 1 9,078,216 10,262,899 310,344 2017 November 4 0.8 2,794,753 3,759,153 107,544 2017 June 4 0.8 2,703,926 3,935,693 103,116 2016 November 5 1 3,092,368 4,456,051 133,172 2016 June 9 1.8 4,406,352 5,901,043 204,052 2015 November 11 2.2 4,933,698 6,662,387 236,692 2015 June 11 2.2 4,597,998 5,887,007 226,652 2014 November 9 1.8 3,137,692 3,912,187 184,124 2014 June 9 1.8 2,898,745 3,521,915 169,324 2013 November 12 2.4 3,040,297 3,812,719 188,252 2013 June 11 2.2 2,690,461 3,517,536 173,580 2012 November 9 1.8 1,291,739 1,890,914 90,548 2012 June 5 1 787,652 1,242,746 56,460 2011 November 2 0.4 187,910 242,995 18,128 2011 June 2 0.4 187,910 242,995 18,128 2010 November 4 0.8 257,243 333,005 25,808 2010 June 5 1 283,380 384,593 30,104 2009 November 3 0.6 199,257 279,702 23,416 2009 June 6 1.2 247,285 333,519 33,456 2008 November 8 1.6 259,394 368,501 37,488 2008 June 6 1.2 189,854 275,617 32,432 2007 November 9 1.8 194,524 303,651 34,932 2007 June 8 1.6 45,697 86,642 10,336 2006 November 10 2 34,162 61,520 10,908 2006 June 11 2.2 36,839 66,776 11,638 2005 November 4 0.8 11,379 21,691 3,354 2005 June 8 1.6 13,995 24,726 4,212 2004 November 7 1.4 6,945 11,873 2,126 2004 June 6 1.2 5,652 9,557 1,750 2003 November 3 0.6 2,099 5,098 1,106 2003 June 2 0.4 1,158 3,747 822
See also Computers EKA (supercomputer) PARAM Wipro Supernova
General History of supercomputing Supercomputing in China Supercomputing in Europe Supercomputing in Japan Supercomputing in Taiwan TOP500
References