“Supercomputers and quantum machines define tomorrow’s discoveries. India had the head start — it just didn’t hold the line.”

By Ravishankar Kalyanasundaram

The Day India Surprised the World

In 2007, deep inside a Tata research campus in Pune, engineers switched on a machine that made the world take notice. It was called EKA — Sanskrit for Number One — and within weeks it was ranked the fourth fastest supercomputer on Earth.

EKA could perform 180 trillion calculations a second, outpacing every system in Asia and most of Europe. China, then, had no machine anywhere near that league. The global technology press reacted with disbelief: a private Indian company had built a computer that rivalled America’s national laboratories.

For a few brilliant months, India stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the world’s computing giants. A small team of engineers had turned ambition into architecture — proof that ingenuity could substitute for bureaucracy.

And then, quietly, we stopped running.

The Moment We Let Go

EKA’s success should have been the beginning of a national computing revolution — a network linking universities, weather scientists, defence labs, and industries hungry for simulation power. Instead, it remained an isolated monument.

The company that built it — Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) — no longer exists in its original form. What could have evolved into a national programme simply faded — a reminder that brilliance, without institutional backing, rarely outlives its creators.

By the time China launched its Tianhe and Sunway TaihuLight machines, both many times faster, India’s achievement had already slipped into nostalgia. We had proved a point; we never built upon it.

Why Supercomputers Matter

A supercomputer is not just a machine; it is a nation’s collective brain. It simulates what cannot be built, predicts what cannot yet be seen, and tests ideas that would take years or billions to verify. When a Japanese scientist designs a new drug, when NASA models a hurricane, or when a German automaker runs crash tests without prototypes — behind each of those achievements hums a supercomputer. They are the silent engines of progress, compressing decades of trial and error into hours of computation.

India, by contrast, works with smaller systems. Our meteorologists run forecasts on Pratyush in Pune and Mihir in Noida — together offering about 6.8 petaflops of power. That may sound large, until one remembers that Japan’s Fugaku runs beyond 400 petaflops and the U.S. NOAA systems operate several times larger. Because of this gap, India’s monsoon and cyclone models run at grid resolutions of 12–25 kilometres, while advanced economies work at 3–5 kilometres — a difference that can mean hours of warning or loss of lives.

India does not rent computing time abroad, but its weather agencies routinely use data and models from international centres such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the U.S. NOAA, a common practice among developing nations. In science this collaboration helps, but it also highlights how dependent we remain on external infrastructure.

In other fields, dependence is economic. Many AI and biotech start-ups in India still lease processing power from global cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Domestic GPU clusters are growing, yet large-scale model training often happens overseas. We have the ideas, but not enough computing muscle to match them.

What the Rest of the World Built

Elsewhere, supercomputers became national infrastructure — as essential as ports or power grids. The United States uses them to design aircraft, simulate nuclear stockpiles, and train the AI models now shaping global business. Japan’s Fugaku, at the RIKEN Institute, maps protein interactions for drug discovery and models climate pathways that guide national policy. China’s exascale systems run digital twins of cities and industries, converting data directly into strategy.

In India, by the time researchers secure approvals and computing access, their peers abroad have already published, patented, and commercialised their results. The absence of home-grown compute power is not merely a technological gap; it is an economic handicap. We lose time, talent, and technological sovereignty in the slow lane of borrowed bandwidth.

A Different Kind of Speed

The difference is not in genius but in governance. Nations that win this race treat computing as infrastructure, not as an occasional project. Their budgets stretch across decades; their scientists, industries, and defence agencies share one ecosystem.

India still operates in compartments. ISRO, DRDO, CDAC and IITs run their own clusters, rarely interconnected. Procurement delays mean new machines arrive outdated. Even as AI, materials science and climate research demand massive compute capacity, we continue to rent cloud power — exporting both data and capital.

We once had the head start. We lacked the stamina.

The New Race: Quantum

Now the next race has begun — quantum computing — and the stakes are even higher. Quantum machines exploit the physics of superposition and entanglement, performing calculations that even today’s fastest systems cannot. Whoever masters them will dominate materials research, drug discovery, logistics, and cryptography.

China has poured billions into the field, launching quantum satellites and building secure communication networks. The United States, driven by private giants like IBM and Google, already demonstrates quantum advantage on selected problems. Europe coordinates a €7 billion Quantum Flagship programme linking universities and industry.

India joined in 2023 with its National Quantum Mission, pledging ₹6,000 crore to build 50–1,000 qubit processors by 2031. The ambition is right; the challenge is continuity. Without sustained funding, collaboration, and talent retention, it could become another EKA — glorious in launch, forgotten in legacy.

A Race That Defines the Future

Supercomputers and quantum computers are not trophies of power; they are the laboratories of tomorrow. Nations that command them will command discovery itself — in medicine, energy, climate, and defence.

Two decades ago, we were ahead. China was nowhere. Today, they simulate their future while we still queue for processing time. Our brightest minds have migrated; our investments have thinned; our policies still confuse mission statements with momentum.

If the twenty-first century is a contest between those who compute and those who consume, India must decide which side it wishes to stand on.

Because there is more to national progress than just GDP.
It is measured not by how briefly we astonish the world, but by how long we sustain our imagination.