In 1987 America refused to sell India a supercomputer. It then offered a weaker model instead, with conditions. Civilian use only. No technology transfer. No re-export. And an American official would be posted in India to monitor how the machine was used. India said no, and handed the job to a man who had never seen a supercomputer in his life. His name is Vijay Bhatkar. He was born on 11th October 1946 in Muramba, a village in Akola district in Maharashtra. He started school directly in class 4. He took his engineering degree at Nagpur, a master's at Baroda and a doctorate at IIT Delhi. India had wanted the machine for a very ordinary reason. Weather forecasting, which for a country of farmers is not a luxury. The Indian Institute of Science wanted one for research. The Americans classed supercomputers as dual use technology, meaning it could also help a nuclear or missile programme. So the export was blocked. In March 1988 the government set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune, and made Bhatkar its founder and executive director. Before that, the Prime Minister asked him 3 questions. Can we do it. Bhatkar said he had never seen a supercomputer, only a photograph of the Cray, and that yes, they could. How long will it take. He said less time than it would take to keep trying to import one. How much will it cost. He said the entire effort, including building the institution, would cost less than buying the Cray. He was given about 30 crore rupees and 3 years. The start was not glamorous. He has said that for the first 6 months he could not recruit a single person, including his own secretary, because of bureaucratic delays. His team took a different route from the Americans. Instead of building 1 enormous processor, they linked many ordinary processors together to work in parallel, using parts that could be bought off the shelf. The prototype was ready in 1990. They called it Param, which in Sanskrit means supreme. Then came the part he did not expect. Nobody believed it was a supercomputer. It did not look like a Cray. He has said even his own computer science professors doubted it. So he took it abroad, to a major international supercomputing conference, and had it demonstrated and benchmarked in public. It was formally recognised there as a supercomputer. In 1991 they completed PARAM 8000. An American newspaper carried the story under a headline that has stayed famous in India. Denied supercomputer, angry India does it. Versions of the machine were later exported to Germany, the United Kingdom and Russia. India went from being refused the technology to selling it. He has one line he repeats. Great nations are not built on borrowed technology.

Dillon Gabriel’s Team on the first drive, it’s 3rd and 25. Yeah. 3 Pre snap penalties. Yikes.

"What Elon and the team achieved is singular. It has never been done before." Building a massive AI supercomputer is usually measured in years. Yet 100,000 GPUs were brought online and running in just 19 days. Not months. Not years. Nineteen days