India's supercomputer program was started in late 1980s because Cray supercomputers were denied for import due to an arms embargo imposed on India, as it was a dual use technology and could be used for developing nuclear weapons.[1][2]
PARAM 8000 is considered India's first supercomputer. It was built by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing with Russian collaboration.[3][4]
As of the end of Nov. 2011, India has only 2 systems on the Top500 list ranking 85th and 403rd.
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Recently unveiled supercomputer SAGA-220 built by ISRO, is capable of performing at 220000 GFLops (220 TFlops). It uses about 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs.[5]
EKA is a supercomputer built by the Computational Research Laboratories with technical assistance and hardware provided by Hewlett-Packard. It is capable of performing at 132800 GFLops (132 TFlops).
PARAM Yuva belongs to the PARAM series of supercomputer developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. It is capable of performing at 38100 GFlops (38.1 TFlops).
The Indian Government has committed Rs 10,000 crore which is a little more than USD 2 Billion to indigenously develop the world's fastest supercomputer by 2017. The Planning Commission of India has agreed to provide the funds to ISRO and to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore to develop a supercomputer with a performance of 132.8 exaflops (132 quintillion floating operations per second). A quintillion has 18 zeros (a million has six). The Indian supercomputer will not be used only for enhancing the country's space abilities, it will also be used to predict monsoon and precise weather inputs to boost agricultural output of the country. The target being set by India is very ambitious while referring to achieving the 'Exaflop' or the next level of computing performance by 2017. ISRO has indeed planned everything very carefully to set such a target for itself. ISRO has already booked key equipments to develop the supercomputer by 2017. Most of the other gadgets will be indigenously developed in India. [6]