Computers, India: history, milestones
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Supercomputers and India
PARAM 8000: India’s first Supercomputer
India Today.in , A home-made , super-duper supercomputer 15/12/2016
1991
Param
A home-made, super-duper supercomputer
The PARAM supercomputer began its life as a result of a technology embargo that had been placed on India. As the story goes, in 1987, during a high-technology meet between India and the US, the then US president Ronald Reagan refused to sell to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi the latest CRAY supercomputers being developed in America. Instead, the Indian premier was offered an outdated machine, and also warned against its use for any purposes other than weather forecasting. This was not without good reason-supercomputers are an essential step toward modern weapons systems. For example, the calculations required to construct an intercontinental ballistic missile cannot be performed on an ordinary computer; it would take far too long. In 1988, for the purposes of developing self-sufficiency in such matters, India established the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, or C-DAC, with Dr Vijay Bhatkar as director. With a deadline of three years, and a budget of around Rs 30 crore, PARAM 8000 was born in 1991.
Pune supercomputers among world’s fastest
Swati Shinde Gole TNN 2013/06/20
Pune: Two computers from Pune feature among the top 100 in the list of 500 fastest supercomputers in the world.
While the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) supercomputer stands 36th in the list, Param Yuva II, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has bagged the 69th position. The IITM supercomputer is yet to be installed while the Param Yuva II became operational this February.
The list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers was announced on Tuesday at the launch of the opening session of the International Supercomputing conference in Leipzig, Germany.
The Param Yuva II has a capacity of 524 teraflops and within three weeks of the launch, it was already running at 70% of its capacity. Precise weather forecasting, faster tapping of natural resources in the sea and designing of customized drugs are possible using Param Yuva II. The IITM supercomputer will start functioning in the next two to three months.
2016: India ranked 9th in global race for supercomputers
- India ranked 9th in global race of supercomputers Nov 28 2016 : The Times of India
What is a supercomputer?
Supercomputers are broadly defined as the fastest computing systems at any given time and are used for scientific purposes that require handling of troves of data at high speed. This includes testing mathematical models using thousands of variables to infer complex phenomena like weather, climate change, nuclear reactions, origin of the universe and so on.
How is the computing power of a supercomputer measured?
The standard unit to measure computational power is FLOPSfloating point operations per second. It is the number of mathematical operations involving fractions that a computer can do per second. For the most basic computers and smartphones, the computational ability is a few megaflops (more than a million operations per second). Chinese supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight -which is ranked the fastest in the world by Top500 (a supercomputer ranking project) -has a computational ability of 93 petaflops, more than a billion times faster than normal computers. Recently it was announced that Japan will spend $173 billion to bu ild the world's fastest supercomputer system with a capacity of 130 petaflops.
What problems were faced by supercomputer pioneers who worked to enhance computer speed?
First, the maximum speed at which electronic signals can travel cannot be faster than the speed of light. Second, because of frequent receiving and transmission of these signals, it was important to have a suitable cooling technique to control the temperature of the system. Both barriers were tackled by decreasing the lengths these signals were re quired to traverse by using circuit boards and innovation in cooling techniques.Other advancements involved introduction of vector arithmetic in computing.
When was the world's first supercomputer built?
In 1965, CDC 6600, a supercomputer designed by US engineer Seymour Cray was installed at the CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. CDC 6600 had a computational capaci ty of three megaflops. In the 1970s, the series CDC 7600 was introduced, which was10 times faster than the earlier version. In 1976, the Cray-1supercomputer was installed in the Los Alamos laboratory with a computation capacity of 160 megaflops.
What were the limitations of Cray's designs?
Cray's designs used expensive technology and liquid immersion technology to achieve high speeds. W Daniel Hill, an MIT graduate proposed a decentralised control instead of one CPU, which meant several inexpensive processors could be arran ged to achieve speeds comparable to the most expensive supercomputer designed by Cray. Hill designed the CM-1 in 1985, which used thousands of inexpensive processors to achieve the same speed as Cray's computer.
Which countries are the world leaders in supercomputers today?
Of the 500 fastest supercomputers, the highest numbers are in the US and China, each having 171 such systems. Germany , Japan and France each have 20 or more such systems. India is ranked 9th with five of its supercomputers listed in Top500.
As in 2020
Every year the list of fastest supercomputers comes out. Published by TOP500, the list this year features two supercomputers from India once again. Pratyush and Mihir, the two supercomputers of India, ranked in at 67th and 120th spot on the list. These rankings were announced on June 22 at the ongoing virtual event ISC (International Supercomputing Conference) High Performance 2020 Digital.
The two Indian supercomputers’ rankings, however, has fallen down compared to last year. According to the 2019 rankings, Pratyush supercomputer was in 57th spot whereas Mihir supercomputer’s ranking was 100. The TOP500 list is a project that regularly ranks and evaluates the top 500 fastest supercomputer systems in the world.
Prathush is India’s fastest supercomputer with 3.7 petaflops high performance. The supercomputer is at the Indian Institute of Meteorology, Pune.
For the uninitiated, a petaflop is the measure of a computer’s processing speed. A petaflop is equal to a quadrillion or a thousand trillion calculations per second.
Mihir, which was ranked 120th, had a capacity of 2.5 petaflops. This particularly fast machine is at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast in Noida.
The two supercomputers were installed in 2018 by the ministry of earth sciences. The estimated cost of installing and setting them up was close to Rs 440 crores, according to an earlier report by The Economic Times.
The two supercomputers are used to help the quality of not just weather forecasts like monsoon but also of cyclones, earthquakes and other extreme events. They can also help forecast air quality, flood, drought among other things.
As for the fastest supercomputer in the world, that title was accorded to Fukagu, a Japanese system backed by Fujitsu and RIKEN. For comparison sake, Fukagu had a performance of 415.53 petaflops. The list, otherwise, was dominated by a lot of supercomputers from China and the USA.
