India's First Supercomputer was PARAM 8000. PARAM
stood for Parallel Machine. The computer was developed by the government
run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in 1991. The
PARAM 8000 was introduced in 1991 with a rating of 1 Gigaflop (billion
floating point operations per second).
All the chips and other elements that were used in making of PARAM were
bought from the open domestic market. The various components developed
and used in the PARAM series were Sun UltraSPARC II, later IBM POWER 4
processors, Ethernet, and the AIX Operating System. The major
applications of PARAM Supercomputer are in long-range weather
forecasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling.
