India is set to stand up an indigenously-built supercomputer next year, according to a Times of India report. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will be overseeing the construction of this “PARAM” series system, which will be the first of more than 70 systems slated to be built under India’s National Supercomputing Mission.
Development of the PARAM series of Indian-made supercomputers extends back to 1990, when the program was created in the face of a technology embargo enacted by the United States. The first system, PARAM 8000, was installed in 1991, becoming India’s first supercomputer. The most recent PARAM system is “Kanchenjunga” (named after the third highest mountain in the world), installed at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Sikkim, India, last month.
Launched in March 2015 with funding of Rs 4,500-crore (roughly $670 million), India’s National Supercomputing Mission seeks to make India competitive at the level of global supercomputing by deploying more than 70 supercomputers over the next seven years in various centers throughout the nation. The machines will be a mix of foreign-sourced and Indian-built machines and will be used for applications such as climate modeling, weather forecasting, drug discovery, industrial uses and more. On the latest TOP500 listing of the world’s fastest number-crunchers, India claimed eleven machines, putting it behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France in terms of both systems share and performance share.
Last year, India deployed its first petaflops (peak) system, named “SahasraT,” at the Supercomputing Education and Research Center (SERC) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, India. The Cray XC40 machine touts a peak of 1.2 petaflops and a LINPACK ranking of 901 teraflops.
The next PARAM machine, slated for arrival in August 2017, will reportedly achieve petaflops-level performance. Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology, cited in the Times of India piece, said that controlling system heat and power demands are key challenges being worked on, adding that power and cooling costs for a system average around Rs 1,000 crore (about $150 million).