Early years

India had faced difficulties in the 1980s when trying to purchase supercomputers for academic and weather forecasting purposes.^[1] In 1986 the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) started the Flosolver project to develop a computer for computational fluid dynamics and aerospace engineering.^[4][5] The Flosolver MK1, described as a parallel processing system, started operations in December 1986.^[4][6][5]

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.^[7] After this problem, in the same year, the Government of India decided to promote an indigenous supercomputer development programme.^[8][9][10] 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).^[9][10] C-DOT created "CHIPPS": the C-DOT High-Performance Parallel Processing System. NAL had started to develop the Flosolver in 1986.^[4][11] BARC created the Anupam series of supercomputers. ANURAG created the PACE series of supercomputers.^[10]

C-DAC First Mission

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was created at some point between November 1987 and August 1988.^[8][10][9] C-DAC was given an initial 3 year budget of Rs375 million to create a 1000MFLOPS (1GFLOPS) supercomputer by 1991.^[10] C-DAC unveiled the PARAM 8000 supercomputer in 1991.^[1] This was followed by the PARAM 8600 in 1992/1993.^[10][9] These machines demonstrated Indian technological prowess to the world and led to export success.^[10][9] 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.^[10] From 1992 C-DAC undertook its "Second Mission" to deliver a 100 GFLOPS range computer by 1997/1998.^[1] The plan was to allow the computer to scale to 1 teraFLOPS.^[10][12] In 1993 the PARAM 9000 series of supercomputers was released, which had a peak computing power of 5 GFLOPS.^[1] In 1998 the PARAM 10000 was released; this had a sustained performance of 38 GFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark.^[1]

C-DAC Third Mission

The C-DAC's third mission was to develop a teraFLOPS range computer.^[1] The PARAM Padma was delivered in December 2002.^[1] This was the first Indian supercomputer to feature on a list of the world's fastest supercomputers, in June 2003.^[1]

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.^[6] NAL's Flosolver had 4 subsequent machines built in its series.^[6] At the same time ANURAG continued to develop PACE, primarily based on SPARC processors.^[6]

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.^[13] Additionally, it was later revealed that India plans to develop a supercomputer with processing power in the exaflops range.^[14] It will be developed by C-DAC within the subsequent five years of approval.^[15]

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.^{[16][17][18][19]} This is a seven-year program worth $730 million (Rs. 4,500 crore).^{[citation needed]} Whilst previously computer were assembled in India, the NSM aims to produce the components within the country.^[20] The NSM is being implemented by C-DAC and the Indian Institute of Science.^[19]

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.^[17] This has been dubbed the "National Knowledge Network" (NKN).^[20] The mission involves both capacity and capability machines and includes standing up three petascale supercomputers.^[21][22]

The first phase involved deployment of supercomputers which have 60% Indian components.^[19] The second phase machines are intended to have an Indian designed processor,^[19] with a completion date of April 2021.^[20] The third and final phase intends to deploy fully indigenous supercomputers,^[19] with an aimed speed of 45 petaFLOPS within the NKN.^[20]

By October 2020, the first assembled in India supercomputer had been installed.^[20] The NSM hopes to have the manufacturing capability for indigenous production by December 2020.^[20]

Current TOP500

As of November 2023^[update] there are 4 systems based in India on the TOP500 supercomputer list.^[23]

India's historical rank in TOP500

Computers

• EKA (supercomputer)
• PARAM
• Wipro Supernova

General

• History of supercomputing
• Supercomputing in China
• Supercomputing in Europe
• Supercomputing in Japan
• TOP500