An Indian supercomputer by 2017. Umm...

This is a tricky question. And for background, here's the tweet from IBN Live that caught my eye.

https://twitter.com/ibnlive/status/247262774898593792

(If you didn't read the IBN piece, this is the gist. India, rather Kapil Sibal, our present telecom minister, will have a state-of-the-art supercomputer, 61 times faster than current-leader Sequoia, built indigenously by 2017 at a cost of Rs. 4,700 crore across 5 years.)

[caption id="attachment_24026" align="aligncenter" width="351"] Kapil Sibal[/caption]

India already has many supercomputers: NAL's Flosolver, C-DAC's PARAM, DRDO's PACE/ANURAG, BARC's Anupam, IMS's Kabru-Linux cluster and CRL's Eka (both versions of PARAM), and ISRO's Saga 220.

The most-powerful among them, PARAM (through its latest version), is ranked 58th in the world. It was designed and deployed by the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY - how apt) in 1991. Its first version, PARAM 8000, used 8,000 Inmos transputers (a microprocessor architecture built with parallel-processing in mind); subsequent versions include PARAM 10000, Padma, and the latest Yuva. Yuva came into operation in November 2008 and boasts a peak speed of 54 teraflops (1 teraflops = 1 trillion floating point operations per second; floating point is a data type that stores numbers as {significant digits * base^exponent}).

Interestingly, in July 2009, C-DAC had announced that a new version of PARAM was in the works and that it would be deployed in 2012 with a computing power of more than 1 petaflops (1 petalfops = 1,000 teraflops) at a cost of Rs. 500 crore. Where is it?

Then, in May, 2011, it was announced that India would spend Rs. 10,000 crore in building a 132.8-exaflops supercomputer by 2017. Does that make today's announcement an effective reduction in budget as well as diminishing of ambitions? If so, then why? If not, then are we going to have two high-power supercomputers?!

Such high-power supercomputers that the proposed 2017-supercomputer will compete with usually find use in computational fluid dynamics simulations, weather forecasting, finite element analysis, seismic modelling, e-governance, telemedicine, and administering high-speed network activities. Obviously, these are tasks that operate with a lot of probabilities thrown into the simulation and calculation mix, and require hundreds of millions of operation per second to be solved within an "acceptable" chance of the answer being right. As a result, and because of the broad scale of these applications, such supercomputers are built only when the need for the answers is already present. They are not installed to create needs but only to satisfy them.

So, that said, why does India need such a high-power supercomputer? Deploying a supercomputer is no easy task, and deploying one that's so far ahead of the field also involves an overhaul of the existing system and network architectures. What needs is the government creating that might require so much power? Will we be able to afford it?

In fact, I worry that Mr. Kapil Sibal has announced the decision to build such a device simply because India doesn't feature in the list of top 10 countries that have high-power supercomputers. Because, beyond being able to predict weather patterns and further extend the country's space-faring capabilities, what will the device be used for? Are there records that the ones already in place are being used effectively?

The Regrettable Stupefaction Of Dr. Manmohan Singh

Only after the 2G scam did I learn how many zeroes there are to numbers aptly called "lakh-crores". The impact of the fiasco didn't really drive home until I listened to my grandfather's woes last night. Its one thing to worry about the country's future in the telecommunications sector when frequencies are allotted and licenses sold for such massive, albeit insufficient, amounts are all canceled, but it's another to know that a parliamentarian (of A. Raja's calibre) who is paid Rs. 56,000 per month finds it insufficient. That's the bottom line at the end of the day.

I don't know what Kapil Sibal or Manmohan Singh are doing either. For being a more progressive lot, they seem to be forgetting their basics, only making it easier for the BJP to hem them in. Of course, the Auditor General (AG) and Dr. Subramaniam Swamy are achieving that by themselves, the latter with added political gains. First, the scam: fine, it's happened, now hand over A. Raja to the CBI's custody so the matter can be sorted out. But no, Sibal is instituted as the interim telecom minister - a move that immediately inculpates Raja in the public eye. Next, Sibal announces a press meet and claims that Raja did nothing wrong, that there was no loss to the govt. India. That's mistake #2: defying the comptroller and auditor general of India (CAG) so blatantly without providing any proof in his defense. As if this wasn't enough, Manmohan Singh, who I used to think was smart, appoints P. J. Thomas as the CVC. Was that defiance of the BJP's disapproval in light of his culpability in the Palmolein oil scam? If so, bad move. Or was that a matter of taking the law into his own hands - again a defiance of the Supreme Court's pending judgment on the same case? Again, if so, bad move.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Dr. Manmohan Singh"][/caption]

And now, Dr. Singh releases a statement claiming he and P. Chidambaram (who, together with Sushma Swaraj, constituted the committee that decided to appoint Thomas as the CVC in September, 2010) agreed on the appointment while Ms. Swaraj, from the BJP, disagreed. Agreement or disagreement is not the prerogative of the commonwealth; if there was a case pending judgment against the name of the CVC - of all the people - then its ineffectiveness in influencing the decision of his promotion reflects poorly on the Prime Minister, the ruling party and, ultimately, the state of the nation.