Dhruva - Supercomputing in Hyderabad

Supercomputer Dhruva was unveiled in the city in March, 2008 to help in defence research and perform functions faster than the existing computers in the country. The computer is 20 times faster than the Param series and will be able to perform the most complicated functions, including guiding aircraft.

The computer, which is the product of research by Advanced Numerical Research and Analysis Group (ANURAG) was placed at the Centre for High Performance Computing and Research (CHITRA) at DRDO, Hyderabad.

(http://insidehpc.com/2008/03/31/new-indian-supercomputer/)

According to Wikipedia definition, a supercomputer is a computer that is considered, or was considered at the time of its introduction, to be at the frontline in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. The term "Super Computing" was first used by New York World newspaper in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University.

The Wiki page for Supercomputer is a good source of information on what a supercomputer is and history of supercomputing in brief http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

The top 500 list of supercomputers can be found at http://www.top500.org/

http://www.supercomputingonline.com/ - This site boasts as the homepage for the world's high-performance supercomputing, networking and storage.

These sites contain good amount of information for whoever wants to know/work on supercomputing.

I was fortunate to work at a place they had housed a Beowolf super cluster (http://www.beowulf.org/) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (http://www.hpc.unm.edu/ - formerly AHPCC).

The supercomputing clusters are normally made up of dual-core linux/unix running PCs stacked together to share processing capacity and resources. The speeds can be very high going up to teraFLOPS (one trillion or 1×1012 FLOPS) where FLOP is a Floating Point Operations per Second. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS).

Kids and young adults interested in working on supercomputing could visit http://www.drdo.org/ if visits are organized by their respective schools (with permission from the concerned authorities?).

If you cannot do so, you can aspire to work on supercomputers at any of the number of universities in USA by applying to the appropriate department. (At UNM - http://www.unm.edu/, supercomputing is used in Molecular Biology department, Computer Science department, EECE and others). You could search for the appropriate department and course on the net and apply accordingly to either undergrad or graduate courses.