How this 78-year-old created India's first supercomputer despite blocks from the US and Europe

While the West may be technologically ahead of the rest of the world, India has never been far behind. We have either learned and used existing technologies or created new ones. Supercomputers, which are exceptionally powerful computers designed to perform complex calculations and process large amounts of data at high speeds, were invented in America in the 1960s when Seymour Cray, the father of supercomputing, designed a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC).

The technology had spread far and wide in the developed countries in the following years. However, in the 1980s, when India asked for access to supercomputers, we were denied by the US and Europe with claims such as India would use the technology for missiles and it was not 'ready' for supercomputers as it was a developing nation. Without the supercomputers, the satellites would be blindfolded, and we would not be able to progress in technology.



The solution for the problem came in the form of Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar, a scientist who took charge of making India's own supercomputer that was faster, cheaper and its own. In 1990, Bhatkar, appointed by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, created a team of scientists, engineers and coders in Pune who were tasked with creating a supercomputer, a device that functioned like 256 brains working as one.

The process went on for three years with zero foreign help in a lab in the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing , which was set up in 1988. In 1991, India debuted PARAM 8000 , a supercomputer that cost a fraction of the USA's Cray supercomputer and was equipped with 64 CPUs, used Inmos T800 transputers and had distributed memory MIMD architecture with a reconfigurable interconnection network. It predicted cyclones, cracked cancer data, decoded black holes and more. Its efficiency was so high that the USA had to slash back the prices of Cray to ensure sales, and it was so in demand that it was being exported to Germany, the UK and Russia.



Bhatkar, the mind behind the achievement, who is currently the Chancellor of Nalanda University, was awarded the Padma Shri & Padma Bhushan and the Maharashtra Bhushan Award. Now, the Indian government is working towards doing better in the field of supercomputing by initiating a 4,500-crore National Supercomputing Mission . This mission targets the installation of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities in India.