Here's The Story Of How India’s First Supercomputer Was Made

The Little Unknown Story Behind The Invention Of First Indian Supercomputer.

The super computer effort in India began in the late 1980,when the US stopped the export of a cray super computer because of continuing technology embargoes. During the 80,s USA and some other European countries had developed super computers, which were critical for developing satellites and nuclear weapons. This countries refuse to transfer the knowledge of creating supercomputers to India, fearing the developing nation might use it to design missiles and warplanes rather than forecast the weather.

Faced with a technology- denial regime that denied its scientific community access to supercomputers, India setup center 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 were fast number crunching  is the major component

To lead the project, P M Rajiv Gandhi, turn to a man who had not seen a super computer.But Vijay Panduranga Bhatkar knew all about shortcuts the

country’s top number-cruncher had begun school directly in the 4^th  standard and still made it to the top. When Rajiv Gandhi met Bhatkar , he asked him three questions

1] ''Can we do it?''
Bhatkar answered , ''I have not seen a supercomputer , I have only seen a picture of the cray!But yes, we can.

2 ] " How long it will take?''
Bhatkar replied , ''less than it will take us in trying to import cray fron USA.

3] " How much money it will take?''
Bhatkar replied, ''the whole effort including building an institution,for developing the technology,will be less than the cost of cray.

The prime minister gave permission for the project. C-DAC summoned scientists from all over the country to work on India's greatest project.
With in the 3 years the project has been completed ,C-DAC  rolled out India's first supercomputer and named as PARAM 8000.
For the 1st time in history,developing country had pulled off such a great advanced computer development.The world has shocked at India's achievement ,many were doubtful about PARAM truly being a supercomputer. That's when Vijay decided to take the PARAM prototype to a major international conference and exhibition of supercomputers.  

Here's The Specifications and Benchmark scores:

A multiprocessor machine ,PARAM 8000 Was benchmarked at 5 GIGAFLOPS ,declared as a second most powerful and fastest super computer on the world at that time.PARAM also set for new series of high performance parallel computers called PARAM series.

A US newspaper published the news with headline.

''Denied Supercomputer, Angry India Does It!''

In 2002 PARAM 20000 (or) PARAM padma ,which has broke the speed of 1 teraflops.
The latest machine in this series are The PARAM Ishan and PARAM Kanchenjunga.Which has been installed at IIT Guwahati. 
PARAM Ishan can be used in applications like computational chemistry,fluid dynamics ,electromagnetic field, nano block assemble, civil engineering structures etc... 
PARAM Kanchenjunga is located at NIT Sikkim's supercomputing center  and it is used for engineering research conducted by the faculty ,student at the institute as well as researchers across the state.
Based on the PARAM has also built the National param supercomputing facility (NPSF). this has now made available grid on the national knowledge network. providing a national wide access to high performances computing infrastructures.
In 2015, Vijay Bhatkar was honoured with Padma Bhushan for the immense for his contribution in the field of science and technology.

NOTICE: During This Article Some Of The Information Has Been Taken  From the Source (The Better India).