India's First Supercomputer – Hasons

Which Is India’s First Super Computer
India’s journey into supercomputing began in 1991 with the unveiling of the PARAM 8000, the nation’s first indigenously built supercomputer. Developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the PARAM 8000 was a technological marvel that propelled India into the elite club of countries with supercomputing capabilities.

What is a Supercomputer?
Before we dive deeper into the story of the PARAM 8000, let’s first understand what exactly is a supercomputer.

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is an extremely powerful computer system with unprecedented processing power and speed. It can perform calculations and process data at a rate much faster than even the best conventional personal computers. For perspective, if a standard laptop today has a processing power of 1 GFLOPS (billion floating point operations per second), a supercomputer’s processing power starts from a few TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second) and goes up to nearly 1 PFLOPS (a quadrillion floating point operations per second)!

Supercomputers are use to solve complex scientific and engineering problems through modeling, simulations and analysis that involve huge amounts of data and calculations that not feasible on normal computers. Fields like weather forecasting, aerodynamic modeling, molecular modeling, physics simulations, oil and gas exploration etc rely heavily on the power of supercomputers.

List of India’s Supercomputers
After the PARAM 8000, India kept making more powerful super computers:

1992: PARAM 8600 built, 60 times faster than PARAM 8000
1998: PARAM 9000 built, 133 times faster
2002: PARAM Padma built, 1000 times faster
2017: PARAM Yuva II built
2022: PARAM Siddhi-AI, fastest ever Indian super computer
Thanks to these super computers, India’s science and technology improved greatly.