The supercomputer SAGA-220, built in 2011, was developed by which organisation?

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.