On December 13 last year, N Balakrishnan brought together 28 of India’s most resourceful minds in the field of supercomputing. Balakrishnan is the associate director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, an aerospace engineer, and a voracious consumer of supercomputing resources. He had been asked by a worried Planning Commission to brainstorm about India’s supercomputing landscape.
India was one of the world leaders in this tech not long ago, but had been left far behind by other countries within a few years. China had come up from a nearabsent position to the top within a decade, now rivaling the US and Japan, and in a good position to overtake them soon in supercomputing resources and knowhow. “There is a strong correlation between a country’s access to supercomputing facilities and its achievements in science and technology,” says Balakrishnan.
Scientists who were potential users of supercomputing had taken the situation seriously. So had the Planning Commission when its members were told about India’s decline in this field. After several meetings and a conference, the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister (SAC-PM) recommended a national programme on supercomputing at a cost of Rs 5-6000 crore. Several leading scientists had, in turn, made similar recommendations to the SAC-PM. Some of them were grand visions to turn India into a supercomputing hub, but many envisaged using the programme to develop cutting edge commercial tech as well.
Balakrishnan himself had recommended a large project that would involve developing several supercomputers of varying speeds. The Planning Commission agreed in principle to fund the project, the level of which could go up to Rs 10,000 crore if necessary. So by the end of the year, there might start a project that would be the largest that India has ever undertaken outside the realm of defence, atomic energy and space. It would use mostly off-the-shelf chips but develop cutting-edge technologies in many other areas. The project would involve the private sector in a big way and thus could kick-start several new companies.
It would network India’s scientists and engineers at a scale never achieved so far. Finally, when the first phase of the project is complete within four to five years, it would place enormous computing resources within easy reach of India’s scientific community and the private sector. “The success of such a project would also depend on its commercial viability,” says Vijay Bhatkar, founder-director of the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), and one of the chief architects of India’s first foray into supercomputing. “So they would need to be general purpose machines capable of solving industrial problems as well.”
This was not the case earlier, but C-DAC developed its supercomputers at a time when space and defence were their primary users. Supercomputing has now moved to the mainstream, with a large number of applications in many areas of science and technology. Parts of modern biology research depend on supercomputing for their survival. Human genome sequencing, for example, wouldn’t be possible without the availability of supercomputers to analyse the results; and sequencing is rapidly becoming an integral part of clinical drug development.
