The Hindu : India joins `teraflop' club

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 02, 2003

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National

India joins `teraflop' club

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore April 1. The exclusive coterie of nations who have designed and built their own supercomputers capable of one teraflops or more — that is, one trillion floating point operations a second — has another applicant for membership: India.

The Union Minister for Information Technology, Arun Shourie, today inaugurated the Bangalore-based Terascale Supercomputing Facility of the Centre for Development for Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and dedicated the nation's most powerful `desi' supercomputer computer, the teraflop `Param Padma'.

Recalling how C-DAC was born in 1988, largely as a response to the denial by the U.S. government of an export clearance for a Cray supercomputer meant for studies at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, Mr. Shourie said, ``Param Padma is our answer to the world. If you deny it to us, we will develop it ourselves''. In the 15 years since then, C-DAC has executed three missions, developing a series of ``Param'' supercomputers, with the latest, Padma, a thousand times more powerful than the first.

Perhaps for the first time, a union minister did not try to gloss over the fact that such computer behemoths have defence and security implications. ``We have to use our own hardware and software for all sensitive military applications... no one is going to give us such technology.''

To explain why sometimes we have to demonstrate the clout to develop high technology for its own sake, Mr. Shourie came up with an Urdu couplet: Sada poochthey hain, ishq se kya phaida, Poochcho unse, phaida se kya phaida.

(They always ask, what is the use of love? Ask them what is the use of being useful?)

C-DAC's executive director, R. K. Arora, explained that the Param Padma achieved its one teraflop number-crunching peak speed with 248 processors distributed in 64 parallel nodes. It addressed a primary storage of over 10 terabytes that could be scaled up to 22 terabytes.

N. Balakrishnan, a leading figure in Indian supercomputing at IISc, suggested that while Padma had provided India with a high performance computer at an incredibly low cost, the other two `C's, content and connectivity, were equally important.

The Union Information Technology secretary, Rajeeva Ratna Shah, announced that the Government had sanctioned a multi-crore project to set up a national `i-Grid' of 10 Param Padma machines to create an information backbone for collaborative work among Indian institutions in biotechnology, bioinformatics, genomics, seismic exploration, weather forecasting and other computation intensive tasks.

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