India’s Quest for Indigenous Supercomputers - an Aspirational Journey

In early 1990, the Government of India created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign supercomputers. Originally, CDAC created the PARAM series to produce these indigenous supercomputers. Later in 2014, National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) was introduced to boost indigenous development and meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, and startups in areas like oil exploration, flood prediction as well as genomics, and drug discovery. As of June 2021 ranking by the number of supercomputer systems in the TOP500 list, India has 3 in the list, with the PARAM Siddhi-AI being the fastest supercomputer in India (ranked 89). The history of supercomputing development in India will be analyzed against the backdrop of competition with the US and China and Japan - three leading countries in the supercomputing field. The opportunities for solving the grand challenge problems using supercomputers and resultant economic benefits to India will be presented.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Ajaya K Mohanty received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Mayland at College Park. He is an internationally recognized Technology Executive with a long and successful stint at IBM and Deloitte where for the last 30+ years, he has played a leading role in developing private and public sector partnerships in scientific research, education, and IT. Dr. Mohanty is the author and co-author of over 35 research papers and publications and several US patents to his credit. He has received the highest Corporate Recognition Awards (IBM CEO Award & Senior VP Award, IBM Invention Achievement Award, and Deloitte Outstanding Performance Awards (OPA)) for Excellence in Research, Management, and Delivery. Dr. Mohanty has helped establish numerous Innovative, joint research projects between IBM and leading institutes in the US, UK, and AP countries, including China, Japan, and India. He has been listed in "Who’s Who in Science and Engineering" and “Who’s Who in the world" (1998). He has advised and consulted DST, DAE, MeitY, GoI - PMO & NITI Aayog on India’s “Mega Science Projects”, “National Supercomputing Mission” and “Digital India”.  He is the recipient of the prestigious Global NRI Award in “Information Technology” in 2017, from Late Pranab Mukherjee, the then President of India.