BANGALORE: First, the good news: 11 of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers are ticking away in India — helping to advance the frontiers of silicon chip design, genetic engineering research and geophysical exploration.

Now, the bad news: none of the machines is made in India — a far cry from the situation three years ago, when India trumpeted its entry into the exclusive "Top 500" club with the `homemade' Param Padma teraflop supercomputer from the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC).

A year later, another `desi' machine, assembled at the Chennai-based Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), a cluster of smaller computers called `Kabru,' also crossed the teraflop barrier to make it into the Top 500 list. A teraflop is a trillion or a million times a million floating point (or mathematical) operations per second.

Cluster supercomputer

Of the 11 supercomputers based in India, only one is housed in a national research institution. The Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology in Delhi houses a Cluster supercomputer from Hewlett Packard, clocking over three teraflops. The other 10 are being used by commercial players, who don't wish to reveal their names, and are coyly listed as `geoscience' and `semiconductor' companies.

The most powerful supercomputer in India is another HP Cluster, which works at 3.8 teraflops for a semiconductor enterprise — it ranks 141 in the Top 500 ranking, released last week jointly by the Universities of Mannheim in Germany and Tennessee in the United States. All the other India-based machines are IBM supercomputers — mostly clusters, a currently popular way of combining the strengths of a number of smaller platforms to achieve supercomputing speeds. They are almost equally divided between machines fuelled by Intel chips and those driven by the rival AMD processor.

All operate on the Open Source Linux system.

No.1 supercomputer

The India-based machines are pygmies compared to the leviathan that rules as the world's most powerful supercomputer: The number one in the list is the IBM BlueGene/L housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories of the University of California. This has been rated at 280.6 teraflops and is the only machine in the world to exceed 100 teraflops. The next computer on the list is the one that IBM made for in housework: it clocks 91.3 teraflops. IBM has 239 machines in the Top 500; HP has157. The world's fastest machine for 5 years — the

Japanese NEC Earth Simulator is down to number 10 this year, with a 35.8teraflop speed.

One reason why the Indian flag wavers of 2003 and 2004 are no more in the Top 500 is because the datum has shifted so fast. Today, the slowest computer in the list exceeds 2 teraflops. Once Indian institutions achieved a place in the list, they seemed to have rested on their laurels and done little in subsequent years to achieve faster computation.

"It is very sad," says Vijay Bhatkar, the person generally credited with the vision that made India, a supercomputing nation.

The former Executive Director of CDAC, who drove the Param supercomputer programme since its inception, is now Chief Mentor at the Pune-based International Institute of Information Technology (I2IT) and also head of the privately-funded ETH Research Labs in the same city.

Speaking over telephone with The Hindu on Friday, Dr. Bhatkar said there was "a clear lack of vision in government and the absence of a master plan for supercomputing in India."

"There is a large requirement for such high performance platforms for genetic research, weather forecasting and aeronautical design," he added, "But such programmes need generous, sustained, funding — which the institutes capable of developing supercomputers don't seem to get once they complete a system or two. We seemed to have lost the competitive edge."

But there is hope yet. Dr. Bhatkar said that he is personally guiding a project at I2IT, which aims to create a "Teraflop-in-a-rack": the power of a teraflop supercomputer in a single cabinet. Once the basic building block has been achieved, it will be relatively simple to multiply the teraflops by attaching multiple racks, he said. The new machine will be ready by March 2007 — and who knows, it may send the world, a signal that when it comes to supercomputing, India still has what IT takes to deliver the big number crunchers.

The latest Top 500 list can be found at http://www.top500.org/

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