The Hindu : Indian teraflop supercomputer ready

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 17, 2002

Business

Business

Indian teraflop supercomputer ready

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE DEC. 16. India's most powerful computing platform, the Param Padma — capable of a peak 1 teraflop that is 1,000 billion floating point operations per second — is ready and working.

The Union Secretary for Information Technology, Rajeeva Ratna Shah, announced this today at the inauguration of the 6th International Conference on High Performance Computing in the Asia Pacific Region (HPC Asia 2002), being held in India for the first time.

The computing behemoth has been developed by the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and is currently functioning in the Centre's Bangalore-based Terascale Supercomputing Facility.

The formal inauguration of the machine is yet to take place. It comes a decade after the C-DAC began work on its mandate to create `desi' supercomputers using parallel processing.

Till date, 52 Param series machines are in use in India and, of these, seven are installed in four foreign countries. Russia has purchased every one of the four versions that the series has gone through while scaling up from one megaflop to one teraflop. The latest `avataar' of Param uses 248 processors working in parallel and the sustained computing power using standard benchmarks is in "several hundred gigaflops".

It will fill vital slots in Indian efforts in protein modeling, genome sequencing and weather prediction, Mr Shah added.

R.K. Arora, C-DAC's Executive Director, suggested that supercomputing — or high performance computing to use the current buzzword — would increasingly be achieved in a collaborative way using grids of smaller computers.

Tomorrow's cutting edge computers would have to work harder (through better processors), be cleverer (through more complex algorithms) and operate in a more cooperative way (through grids and clusters), he said.

In his inaugural remarks, the Union Science and Technology Secretary, V.S. Ramamoorthy, suggested that the I-Grid or India grid of computers being anchored by C-DAC be broadened to assume a more pan-Asian role, in cooperation with other nations in the region.

The HPC conference, which continues till December 19, has drawn contributions from all major Indian and Asian institutions working in high performance computing as well as global IT industry leaders such as IBM, Intel, Sun, Microsoft and Silicon Graphics.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business