Science & Technology Quiz: Supercomputers of India

The correct answer is A, Param 8000. PARAM 8000 was built by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing at Pune and was unveiled in 1991, three years after C-DAC itself was set up in 1988. The project was led by Vijay P. Bhatkar, the founding Director General of C-DAC, and it was taken up because the United States had refused to sell India a Cray supercomputer. The word PARAM means supreme in Sanskrit and also stands for PARAllel Machine, the architecture on which the system was built.

Option B, Aditya, is a high performance computing system of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, commissioned much later, and the name is also used for ISRO solar work, so it is not the first machine. Option C, Anupam-Adhyay, belongs to the Anupam series of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, which serves nuclear research and came after PARAM. Option D, SAGA-220, was built by ISRO at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in 2011, twenty years after PARAM 8000.

The correct answer is A, IIT BHU. PARAM Shivay was commissioned in 2019 at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, and it was the first supercomputer assembled within India under the National Supercomputing Mission. The mission was launched in 2015 and is steered jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology, with C-DAC Pune and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, as the implementing agencies. The point of assembling the machine in India was to build local skill in high performance computing hardware.

Option B, IIT Kharagpur, received PARAM Shakti, a later system of the same mission, so the institute is right for a different machine. Option C, IISc Bengaluru, is an implementing agency of the mission and hosts PARAM Pravega, commissioned in 2022. Option D, IISER Pune, hosts PARAM Brahma. All four institutions have mission systems, which is exactly the confusion the question sets up; only PARAM Shivay at IIT (BHU) was the first.

The correct answer is A, PARAM Ganga. PARAM Ganga was set up at IIT Roorkee in 2022 under the second phase of the National Supercomputing Mission, and it was designed and installed by C-DAC. Phase II of the mission is the stage at which the server boards began to be manufactured in India instead of being imported ready made, so machines of this phase mark an important step in self reliance. The naming pattern of the mission attaches a familiar Indian name to the host institution, and Ganga suits Roorkee, which stands in the Ganga basin of Uttarakhand.

Option B, PARAM Bheem, is not a system of this mission at Roorkee. Option C, PARAM Yuva, belongs to an earlier generation of C-DAC machines at Pune, where PARAM Yuva II was commissioned in 2013, well before the mission began. Option D, PARAM Yamuna, is a plausible sounding river name but no such machine was installed at IIT Roorkee.

The correct answer is B, Vijay P. Bhatkar. He was the founding Director General of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, set up at Pune in 1988, and he led the team that delivered PARAM 8000 in 1991. Because the project gave India its own supercomputer after a foreign machine was denied, he is commonly described as the architect or father of India’s supercomputer programme. He was later associated with the national effort on indigenous computing and with several educational institutions.

Option A, Raj Reddy, is an eminent Indian born computer scientist and a Turing Award winner, but his work was in artificial intelligence and robotics in the United States, not the PARAM programme. Option C, Narinder Singh Kapany, was a physicist known as the father of fibre optics, a different field altogether. Option D, Sam Pitroda, led the telecom revolution in India through C-DOT, the Centre for Development of Telematics, which is often confused with C-DAC because the names look alike.

The correct answer is B, 1988. C-DAC was set up at Pune in 1988 as a scientific society of the central government, with the specific task of designing an Indian supercomputer after the United States declined to supply the Cray machine India had sought for weather forecasting. The organisation works today under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and is also the implementing agency of the National Supercomputing Mission.

Option A, 1984, is the year associated with the beginning of the national computer policy and with C-DOT, the telecom body, so it is a natural trap. Option C, 1991, is the year PARAM 8000 was delivered, three years after the institution was founded; candidates who remember only one date often merge the two. Option D, 1995, is later than both and marks nothing in this story. The safe way to hold the facts is as a pair: C-DAC in 1988 and PARAM 8000 in 1991.

The correct answer is B, MeitY and the Department of Science and Technology. The National Supercomputing Mission, launched in 2015, is run jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Science and Technology, and the work on the ground is carried out by C-DAC Pune along with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. The aim is a grid of supercomputers in academic and research institutions, connected over the National Knowledge Network, with the Indian content of the hardware rising from phase to phase.

Option A names education bodies, which host several of the machines but do not steer the mission. Option C names ISRO and the Department of Atomic Energy, which run their own systems such as SAGA-220 and the Anupam series but are not the mission authorities. Option D names NITI Aayog, a policy body, and the Ministry of Earth Sciences, which owns the separate weather machines Pratyush and Mihir.

The correct answer is B, FLOPS, short for floating point operations per second. A supercomputer is built for scientific calculation on decimal numbers, so the useful measure is how many such operations it finishes in a second, not how fast a single chip ticks. The ladder runs gigaflops, teraflops, petaflops and exaflops, each a thousand times the one before, and the Top500 list ranks the world’s fastest machines by their FLOPS score on the LINPACK benchmark.

Option A, hertz, measures the clock frequency of a processor. It says how many cycles a chip completes in a second but says nothing about how many useful calculations a cluster of thousands of chips finishes together. Option C, bytes per second, measures the rate at which data moves through a network or a disk, which matters for storage but is not the speed of computation. Option D mixes a dated instruction count with a power figure and is not the standard unit.

The correct answer is A, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. Pratyush was commissioned in 2018 under the Ministry of Earth Sciences and is the larger of the two machines the ministry uses for weather and climate modelling. Its companion is Mihir at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida. Together they allowed the forecast model to be run on a much finer grid, which improved monsoon forecasts, cyclone tracks and extreme rainfall warnings.

Option B, the India Meteorological Department at New Delhi, issues the forecasts and warnings but the heavy computation is done on the machines at Pune and Noida. Option C, the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, is an implementing agency of the National Supercomputing Mission and hosts PARAM Pravega, not a weather machine. Option D, the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad, works on space and atmospheric science under the Department of Space and does not host Pratyush.

The correct answer is B, Indian Space Research Organisation. SAGA-220 was built in 2011 at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, and its name stands for Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture, the figure 220 marking a speed of about 220 teraflops. Its design used graphics processing units rather than ordinary processors alone, which made it comparatively cheap, compact and economical in power. ISRO uses it for problems such as the flow of gases around a launch vehicle.

Option A, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, runs the Anupam series of machines for nuclear science, a separate family. Option C, DRDO, develops defence systems and has its own computing facilities but did not build SAGA-220. Option D, CSIR, is a network of national laboratories and supports high performance computing in several of them, yet the machine named in the question belongs to the space programme.

The correct answer is A, Top500. The Top500 list has been published twice a year since 1993 and ranks the five hundred most powerful computer systems that have been measured, using the LINPACK benchmark, which times a machine while it solves a large system of linear equations. Indian machines have appeared on the list several times; EKA, built at Pune in 2007, was ranked fourth in the world in the list of November that year.

Option B, Green Grid, suggests the separate Green500 ranking, which orders machines by performance for each watt of power consumed rather than by raw speed. Option C, Fortune 500, is a business list of the largest companies by revenue and has nothing to do with computing performance. Option D, Global HPC Index, is an invented name of the kind paper setters add to make the real answer harder to pick out.

The correct answer is D, one thousand trillion. The ladder of units rises by a factor of a thousand at each step: a megaflop is a million operations in a second, a gigaflop is a billion, a teraflop is a thousand billion, which is one trillion, and a petaflop is a thousand trillion. The next step, the exaflop, is a thousand petaflops. Indian mission machines such as PARAM Ganga and PARAM Pravega are rated in petaflops, which is why the unit matters for this topic.

Option A, one million, is the megaflop, the scale of early machines. Option B, one billion, is the gigaflop; PARAM 10000 of 1998 was rated at about a hundred gigaflops. Option C, one thousand billion, is the teraflop, the unit in which SAGA-220 was rated at 220. Each wrong option is one rung of the same ladder, so the question rewards a candidate who has memorised the order rather than one number.

The correct answer is B, Kolkata. The three PARAM Rudra systems dedicated in 2024 under the National Supercomputing Mission went to the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope near Pune for radio astronomy, the Inter-University Accelerator Centre at New Delhi for research in physics and materials, and the S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences at Kolkata for work in physics, cosmology and earth sciences. Rudra is also the name of the indigenous high performance server developed under the mission, paired with an interconnect named Trinetra.

Option A, Chennai, hosts other research computing but not a PARAM Rudra system of this set. Option C, Hyderabad, is a major centre for information technology and has large commercial data centres, which makes it a tempting choice. Option D, Ahmedabad, hosts the Physical Research Laboratory and space science work, but the third Rudra machine went to Kolkata.