India’s super computer era began when our prime minister dedicated to the nation, country’s first super computer, Rs. 15 cores US made, CRAY-X-MP 14 on 25th March, 1989.
The main application of this super computer is in medium range weather forecasting to agro meteorology programmers to agricultural operations to water resource management. It is established at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), a constituent unit of the DST (Department of Science and Technology), New Delhi.
Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) provides weather data of the country to it which forecasts weather conditions 3 to 10 days in advance. Other function of this super computer is to promote and undertake studies on crop-weather relationships, impact of weather and climate on pests and diseases and for development of suitable agro met models. For dissemination of agro met advisories to the farming communities, 127 Agro meteorological Field Units (AMFUs) distributed in the country according to the agro climate zones have been established in a phased manner.
Indigenously developed India’s first super computer FLOSOLVER was the product of the Bangalore-based National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) in 1980. FLOSOLVER MK3 is the latest version of the system that is commissioned at the centre for Atmospheric Sciences at Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Bangalore.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
For defense research DRDO (Defense Research Development Organization) has installed a super computer called PACE (Processor for Aerodynamic Computation and Evaluation) developed by the Hyderabad based Advanced Numerical Research and Analysis Group (ANURAG). It has a peak performance of 100 megaflops. PARAM, another Indian Super Computer developed by Pune based Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has already entered into the world market as a multipurpose high speed machine.
Several other parallel processing systems like ‘CHIPPS 16’ of the Bangalore based C-DOT, MULTIMICRO of IISc, Bangalore, ARRAY Processor of CMC Ltd. and MACH of IIT, Bombay.