India's needs more supercomputers: For scientific research to industries

Computing power is as vital to the economy as highways and factories. The technology has to be affordable and accessible for private firms and the government

From Param 8000 to Param Rudra: India’s supercomputing power keeps growing. Param 8000 was the country’s first indigenously built supercomputer in 1991 and Rudra, a set of three, was inaugurated last week.

Computing power is as crucial to a nation’s economic sovereignty as digital and telecom infrastructure. In an era of connected devices and digital platforms, strong connectivity and computing power are as important as highways and factories are for an economy. 

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has said that India will deploy 10,000 graphics processing units (GPU) in the next few months in a public private partnership model. An arrangement will allow the government and private entities to access high-level computing prowess for digital applications. Though experts estimate that at a national level, several thousand more GPUs will be needed for India. (A GPU is a computer chip that renders graphics and images by performing rapid mathematical calculations and it is used in computing.)

Additionally, India is deepening its investment in supercomputers. The three PARAM Rudra supercomputers are worth around Rs 130 crore and were developed under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The supercomputers are in Pune, Delhi and Kolkata for scientific and industrial research. 

India’s super-computer journey began in the 1980s and Param 8000 was launched in 1991. NSM began in 2015 to connect national academic and research and development (R&D) institutions with a grid of more than 70 high-performance computing (HPC) facilities. The goal was to put India in the league of nations with the best computing power. NSM works under the government’s departments of Science and Technology and the Electronics and Information Technology and it has an estimated budget of Rs 4,500 crore for a period of seven years.

The artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer AIRAWAT, installed at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune, is ranked 75th in the world. It was in the Top 500 Global Supercomputing List at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) in Germany.

Though India is ranked 74th globally for such technology, it has only nine supercomputers out of more than 500 in the world. Another nine are expected to be added under the NSM. A supercomputer conducts trillions of calculations simultaneously by combining the power of many separate computers (known as nodes) that work parallelly. A common metric for measuring the performance of such machines is flops, or floating point operations per second.

Param Rudra has already become crucial in scientific research. The Giant Metre Radio Telescope in Pune will leverage it to explore Fast Radio Bursts and other astronomical phenomena. The Inter-University Accelerator Centre in Delhi will conduct enhanced research in material science and atomic physics. The S N Bose Centre in Kolkata will drive advanced research in areas such as physics, cosmology, and earth sciences, according to a statement by the government. Arka and Arunika HPC systems have been developed and tailored for weather and climate research.

According to a Mordor Intelligence report, the HPC market is valued at $54.32 billion and is expected to grow and become worth $96.79 billion in five years. “Factors such as the increasing investments in the industrial internet of things, artificial intelligence, and engineering, which demand Electronic Design Automation, are likely to drive the market,” says the report. 

The use of data and Cloud centres, internet of things and AI has made corporate India hungry for computing power. Affordable and accessible computing power will be as important as electricity for startups and small and medium enterprises in India. A combined effort of investment in computing power by the government and private sector will be needed for the digital growth of the country.