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like cabinets interconnected with optic fiber
cables. It requires huge amount of electricity (few
Megawatts) to run a Supercomputer, besides
a special cooling system is essential to absorb
the heat generated from the machine. This
cooling system also consumes huge electricity.
Now about the price of a Supercomputer; as
Supercomputers are not sold in supermarkets
it’s very difficult to speak about its market price
still we will try to give you an idea. ‘SAGA-220’
(220 TeraFLOPS speed) is a Supercomputer
built by ‘Indian Space Research Organisation’
(ISSRO) in 2011, installed at ‘Vikram Sarabhai
Space Centre’ (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram
It’s very amazing that the popular computer costs about Rs. 14 crores.
operating system ‘Windows’ has no entry
in the arena of supercomputers. The early Indians should feel pride over the fact that
supercomputer operating systems were tailor India was among the pioneers regarding
made but since the end of 20 century ‘Linux’ is Supercomputer. The history is quite interesting.
th
used as operating system of super computers. Till eighties USA was the only country who had
The present fastest supercomputer ‘Sequoia’ supercomputing technology. USSR was trying
runs with two Linux OSs, ‘Computer Node to achieve it. Other technological giants, Japan,
Linux’ on over 98,000 nodes, and ‘Red Hat West Germany etc. were far away from it. In the
Enterprise Linux’ running on 768 I/O nodes mid eighties India urged to purchase a Cray
that are connected to the filesystem. series Supercomputer from USA for using in
meteorological forecasting and other scientific
Supercomputers of 1980s and earlier used only researches. Then it was the era of cold-war.
few processors. In the first Indian Supercomputer After much negotiation USA actually denied to
‘Param 8000’ only 64 processors were used but handover the technology to India by imposing
in modern Supercomputers more than hundred several humiliating conditions. The underlying
thousand processors are being used. A list of fear was that India might use the supercomputing
world’s top 500 Supercomputer is maintained technology for developing nuclear weapons.
based on their LINPACK Benchmarks results. Then Indian scientists and technologists took
In that list India’s fastest Supercomputer the challenge of “Made in India” Supercomputer.
of today is listed at #58 which is installed at For this purpose a new institution was set up
‘CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and in 1988 by the name “Centre for Development
Computer Simulation’. of Advanced Computing” (C-DAC). The success
came within two years; in 1990 first prototype of
If you have become quite interested about Indian Supercomputer was built. It was named
Supercomputer and thinking of purchasing one ‘Param’ (Parallel Machine), the word ‘Param’ is
for your game-console here is some other facts Sanskrit in origin and it means ‘The Supreme’.
about it. A modern Supercomputer requires The prototype was benchmarked at the 1990
almost a warehouse size space. There, you will Zurich Supercomputer Show. India became
find several (in ‘Sequoia’ it is 96) tall refrigerator-
second after USA. In 1991 the first full-fledged
Indian Supercomputer, ‘Param 8000’ was
installed. It had a speed of 1 GigaFLOPS.
Here there is another interesting story. Initially
nobody was ready to accept that the machine
India had made was actually a Supercomputer.
Even some scientists attached to this project
were not much confident of it. Because ‘Param’
didn’t look like a Supercomputer known
SAGA 220 different. But all doubts ended when it was
till then and its architecture was also quite
benchmarked at Zurich and it surpassed most
of the machines produced in the show.
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