India's Indigenous Supercomputer

Indigenous Supercomputer - A feather in the cap of India's tech field

India has been gifting many talented software and hardware engineers to the world. They have placed India on the summit of technological achievement helping it secure a place among the giants of technological advancement like the US, Japan, China and EU; these countries are the proud owners of world's most advanced supercomputers. Now, India is all set to be a part of the pantheon as its indigenous supercomputer will be ready to run by mid 2017. This is an integral part of Rs. 4500 crore programme initiated by the Government of India.

Who is developing the Supercomputer?

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing is actively involved in developing this supercomputer. The aforementioned centre has already fetched numerous accolades for developing Param, the first supercomputer of India.

The government had approved this plan of developing an indigenous supercomputer in March. The ambitious plan was proposed by the National Supercomputing Mission. Further, there are 80 more supercomputers in the pipeline and will take shape in the next seven years.

Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology, told Zee News that some of these supercomputers would be imported and rest of them would be built in India. He also said that the work is going on as to how to control heat. The cost of power to run these supercomputers alone will be close to Rs. 1,000 crore.

What is a Supercomputer?

A computer, which has the capacity to perform high-level computation. A supercomputer is much advanced and faster when compared to a normal computer. Million instructions per second or MIPS is used for measuring the performance of a normal computer; whereas the performance of a super computer is measured using floating-point operations per second or FLOPS. As of now, supercomputers that can give performance of quadrillions of FLOPS are available.

Seymore Roger Cray developed the first successful supercomputer in the year 1976 and it was called as Cray 1.

With the production of a supercomputer in 2017 and a series of such computers in the next seven years, India makes it clear to the world that it has been rigorously working to pave way for itself to the top of the technological summit.