Mumbai: India is gradually losing its place as a supercomputing power, if one were to go by the rankings of the top 500 world’s most powerful supercomputers. Key to reversing that trend is the National Supercomputing Mission, which is expected to receive the government’s go-ahead by this month-end.

India had only nine supercomputers on the latest Top500 list, released on Monday. In November, India had 12 supercomputers on the list, which is published twice a year by Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee who has been involved in the making of the Top500 list since 1993.

Eight of the nine have slipped from their rankings six months ago, and not one figures in the top 50.

Even Eka, touted as the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer in November 2007, does not find a place in the June Top500 rankings. Built by the Computational Research Laboratories Ltd (CRL), now a wholly-owned unit of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), the Hewlett-Packard (H-P) system cost $30 million and was built in just six weeks.

That year was also the first time that an Indian supercomputer figured among the world’s top 10. India had nine supercomputers in that Top500 list, with two of them being in the top 100—the other being an International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) system at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science.

China, on the other hand, had 10 supercomputers in the November 2007 list but just one, ranked 59, in the top 100 list.

Seven years later, China has emerged the clear winner.

For the third consecutive time, Tianhe-2—a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology—has retained its position as the world’s fastest supercomputer with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).

The number of Chinese systems on the list has risen from 63 to 76, giving the Asian nation nearly as many supercomputers as the UK (30), France (27) and Germany (23) combined. The number of Japanese systems has increased to 30, from 28 on the earlier list.

The US remained the top country in terms of overall systems with 233, though the figure is down from 265 in November.

“We have stayed where we were a year before because of the election year, but others in the world have moved ahead," said Rajat Moona, appellate authority and director general of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)—the Pune-based research and development wing of the information technology ministry.

“However, now the National Supercomputing Mission is in advanced stages of approval. We expect it to start rolling out in July end after the budget," he said.

The ₹ 4,500 crore proposal includes setting up over 70 supercomputers in educational institutions, research and development (R&D) centres and C-DAC centres across India, according to Moona.

“The timeline for the mission is seven years, but we think much of the work will happen in first four years," he said, adding, “If we get approval by July end, I think we can see the first supercomputer under the mission being set up in January 2015."

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and designed primarily by Seymour Cray at US-based Control Data Corp. (CDC). PARAM 8000, built in 1991 by C-DAC with Russian collaboration, is considered India’s first supercomputer.

Supercomputers are used in oil exploration by companies such as Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd and Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. They are used in climate modelling to detect trends like global warming. Supercomputers are also needed in space programmes, nuclear reaction simulations, bio-technology and gene sequencing, and a whole range of scientific applications—calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modelling and physical simulations.

All these applications are connected by C-DAC on the national knowledge network (NKN) and have used the grid computing model since 2005.

India’s supercomputers lack speed, confined as they are to performing teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). Getting to the petaflop level would mean increasing the processor power by 10 times, the cooling to 4,000 tonnes and higher floor space, all of which require a new supercomputing architecture.

Experts estimate it will cost about ₹ 500 crore to build a petaflop supercomputer.

“Supercomputer is a very niche area like car racing that requires single-minded focus. Not all countries take it seriously all the time," said S. Sadagopan, director, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bangalore.

“Some like the US, Japan and Germany take it seriously all the time. China has taken it super seriously. India, as usual, goes through fits and starts—C-DAC Param once, Param Padma next, Eka suddenly. It is also an expensive proposition and needs a killer instinct, which India lacks, unlike China," he added.

Because of that lack of a “killer instinct", only one supercomputer from India figures in the June top 100 list—the IBM computer from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, ranked 52 (44 in November), despite the government having announced ₹ 5,000 crore to build a high performance computing, or HPC, ecosystem in the 12th Five-Year Plan.

“Since we are almost half way into the Plan, we may have ₹ 2,500-3,500 crore that will be available under the Plan", said N. Balakrishnan, associate director at the Indian Institute of Science.

C-DAC, said Moona, is also looking at creating an HPC ecosystem “which includes computing (power), applications, manpower and million core cloud," used for applications running on supercomputers. The supercomputing mission, added Moona, is looking at creating a workforce of 20,000 trained professionals in HPC space, up from the current 1,000-2,000. “We are working with IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), NITs (National Institutes of Technology) for training undergraduate, postgraduate and diploma students."

Moulishree Srivastava in New Delhi contributed to the story.

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