C-DAC has advented the OpenFrame Architecture for scalable & flexible High Performance Computing unifying the well known NOW (Network of Workstations), COW (Cluster of Workstations) and MPP (Massively Parallel processor) architectures. This architecture has been realized in C-DAC’s new PARAM 10000 series supercomputers, which are scalable from the desktop to teraflop range. The OpenFrame architecture of PARAM 10000 also realizes the server consolidation architecture required for building general-purpose High Performance Computing facilities.

The PARAM 10000 series of machines are powered by state-of-the-art and emergent SUN’s UltraSparc series of Servers/Workstations configured as Compute nodes, File Servers, Graphics nodes and Internet Server nodes. These nodes are interconnected through PARAMNet a high bandwidth, low latency network designed in-house and a choice of other high performance networks such as Myrinet, Gigabit, Fast Ethernet and ATM.

All these networks can be present concurrently for redundancy and fault tolerance. The bandwidth of PARAMNet is 400 + 400Mbps per port, the bandwidth of Myrinet is 1.28 +1.28Gbps per port, Gigabit provides a bandwidth of 1000Mbps per link, Fast Ethernet provides 100Mbps per link and bandwidth of ATM can be 155/622Mbps per port.

High Performance Secondary Storage of upto 1 Terabyte capacity is based on SUN Enterprise Network Array A5000 of hot swappable FCAL (Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop) disks supporting RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) levels 0, 0+1, 1, 5. A variety of industry standard tertiary storage systems can be interfaced to the PARAM system, depending on the usage requirements. The necessary support for Remote Site Mirroring for disaster recovery has been extended.