Is India Ready to Compete in Supercomputers in 2022?
Named according to its operational efficiency, a supercomputer is defined as any super-fast computer that possesses one of the most powerful and fastest systems in the world at any given point in time.
Justifying its name with its expected operation skills, supercomputers have now become the backbone of every large-scale research and development project in every country.
And the same holds for India which is still a newcomer in the industry of hyperscale computing (HPC).
Hype around the expected launch of five new Supercomputers in India filled the industry with a new zeal a few weeks ago as the Indian government confirmed the news that it had five HPC systems that are in the final stages of installation.
According to their predictions, India can expect nine new supercomputers this year. Following the hype, the country’s National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) had recently deployed “PARAM Ganga” a petascale supercomputer that was launched at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee.
And the most astonishing fact about this new deployment came up during its inauguration when B. V. R. Mohan Reddy, Chairman of the Board of Governors for IIT Roorkee revealed that almost all critical components of PARAM Ganga like motherboards for compute nodes and direct-contact liquid cooling data centers were ingeniously manufactured in India itself under the Government of India’s most hyped initiative of Atmanirbhar Bharat.
Regardless of its popularity and expectations, Top Supercomputers in India are considered a new phenomenon that successfully entered the HPC field only in the year 1991 after the United States government denied India’s request to purchase a Cray X-MP Supercomputer since the HPC machine could be utilized in dual use of research as well as for weapons development.
However, before jumping in the names of some of the Top Supercomputers in India that are flooding the market, we must acquaint ourselves with what are supercomputers and how is it used in real-time operations.
Origins of Supercomputers
Similar to its name, Unlike Top Supercomputers in India that came up late, one of the first supercomputers came into being during the Second World War built in Britain and was designed to crack as well as read messages of German code.
Suited according to its operations the first supercomputer was named Colossus which could read up to 5,000 characters a second. Sounds brilliant, right?
It was for its first-time origins, but now compared to the NASA Columbia supercomputer, the current supercomputer can complete 42 and a half trillion operations per second.
In other words, what we could aptly describe as being Top Supercomputers in India are qualified to be super-fast calculator and is as advanced as any computer can get.
Unraveling Supercomputers
Named according to its operational efficiency, a supercomputer is defined as any super-fast computer that possesses one of the most powerful and fastest systems in the world at any given point in time.
Or in technical terms, a supercomputer is a special computer with a high level of performance skills as compared to a general-purpose computer. Generally, the performance of a supercomputer is tracked through its floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
FLOPS is a measure of computer performance and is used in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
It is more accurate than the million instructions per second (MIPS) measure.
Typically, Top Supercomputers in India or any general supercomputer are made up of hundreds of thousands of processor cores and require an entire building to house and cool the entire system which naturally requires heavy investments of millions of dollars to create and maintain them.
Top Supercomputers in India
Considering the high rise of Top Supercomputers in India in the last few decades, since the introduction of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), we have compiled a list of some of the Top Supercomputers in India that are fully operational currently.
PARAM Pravega
Coming up as the most powerful supercomputer in India, Param Pravega is named as one of the Top Supercomputers in India which is launched at the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) in Bengaluru.
Param Pravega possesses a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops wherein 1 petaflop equals a quadrillion or 1015 operations per second.
PARAM Siddhi-AI
Securing its place among the ranks of the Top 500 in the world, another top name in the list of Top Supercomputers in India is PARAM Siddhi-AI.
Built under the NSM initiative, this supercomputer is a part of the PARAM series and is built on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture networking while equipped with C-DAC’s developed HPC-AI engine and software frameworks.
Pratyush (CRAY XC40)
Another Top Supercomputers in India, Pratyush is installed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune and is equipped with a 4.0 petaflop array of processors that is mainly used to make weather and climate analysis.
This supercomputer entered the esteem list of Global Top 500 list with a rank of 107th in 2021.
Mihir (CRAY XC40)
Another big name in the list of Top Supercomputers in India, Mihir also gained access to the list of Top 500 list of fastest supercomputers like Pratyush at 187th rank.
It is currently installed at the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in Noida and is capable of churning out 2.8 PetaFlops, which might be a little underpowered as compared to Pratyush but is still a great performer nonetheless.
