India’s first supercomputer, PARAM 8000, was developed by the government-run Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in 1991. The name PARAM stands for Parallel Machine, reflecting its advanced computing architecture. With a performance rating of 1 gigaflop (one billion floating-point operations per second), PARAM 8000 marked a significant milestone in India’s technological capabilities.

All components used in PARAM 8000 were sourced from the open domestic market, including chips and other hardware. Later models in the PARAM series utilized processors such as Sun UltraSPARC II and IBM POWER4, running on the AIX operating system. PARAM supercomputers have been widely applied in fields like long-range weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design, and molecular modeling, supporting critical scientific research in India.