ICAD, C-DAC Co-operation

The Institute for Computer Aided Design, Russian Academy of Sciences (ICAD, RAS) have worked in close co-operation with C-DAC for a decade. A series of the PARAM Supercomputers of C-DAC have been installed at ICAD over the years. Academician Oleg M. Belotserkovskii pens down his appreciation of the efforts of C-DAC and the association of the two institutes.
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The Institute for Computer Aided Design, Russian Academy of Sciences (ICAD RAS), is a premier Institute for scientific and technical research and advanced studies in the field of advanced computing.

For over nine years, ICAD has worked in close collaboration with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, India. C-DAC is India’s leading organisation for the design and development of hardware, system software and applications software in the field of supercomputers, based on parallel processing architectures. During this period scientists of ICAD and C-DAC have interacted extensively for carrying out joint development of computer software on parallel machines in a variety of application areas. This close co-operation has resulted in ICAD installing a large configuration of the PARAM 8000 parallel super computer developed by C-DAC in India in 1992. Scientists and researchers of ICAD and other institutions have been using this machine extensively for their research and have found that the system is extremely reliable and of a very high quality. The system is also very stable and has excellent features for reduced mean time to repair (MTTR).
     Academician Oleg
     M. Belotserkovskii

In addition to all the features of excellent international quality, C-DAC’s systems have the lowest price performance ratio in the Supercomputer market.

Following this, an exhibition of Indian system was organised jointly by ICAD and C-DAC in 1997. In this exhibition C-DAC demonstrated a 4 node PARAM OpenFrame system which was its latest model of PARAM series at that time. At a request from ICAD the system was left for evaluation and testing. ICAD’s experience with this model was also extremely good and a number of software codes were ported on the new system, which resulted in high throughput and overall enhanced performance.

During the recent on-going visit of the ICAD team led by Acad. O.M. Belotserkovskii, Prof. V.A. Gushchin and Ms. Lyudmila Kornakhova C-DAC demon-strated their latest model of the PARAM range of super-computers called the PARAM 10000. This system consisting of 160 Ultra SPARC processors is configured with three high speed networks and gives an overall peak computing power close to a 100 Gigaflops. The machine is extremely well engineered and has an architecture that is scalable to a teraflop range. The system is complemented with a rich repertoire of systems software and utilities, which can facilitate rapid development, and porting of application software. The added advantage of this new machine is that it is compatible with the PARAM OpenFrame system installed at ICAD.

Based on the experience, ICAD has had with both the above PARAM installations and the excellent rapport and co-operation that scientists and researchers of ICAD enjoy with the engineers of C-DAC, ICAD is planning to purchase a model of PARAM 10000 Parallel Supercomputer System and subsequent more powerful versions of the PARAM machine.

For ICAD RAS

Acad. Oleg M Belotserkovskii
Director, ICAD RAS
Moscow, Russia