Bangalore, April 01, 2003

C-DAC's Terascale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF) which houses the next generation high performance scalable supercomputing cluster - PARAM Padma, currently with a peak computing power of one Teraflop was inaugurated by Shri. Arun Shourie, Minister for Disinvestment and Communications & Information Technology, Govt. of India, at the C-DAC Knowledge Park here today.

PARAM Padma, India's most powerful supercomputer was dedicated to the nation by Shri. Shourie in the presence of Shri. Rajeeva Ratna Shah, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information technology, Govt. of India. Speaking on the occasion, Shri. Shourie lauded the efforts of the scientists at C-DAC for this accomplishment. He assured C-DAC of his full-fledged support in its future endeavors particularly the iGrid supercomputing network.

Appreciating C-DAC's efforts in placing India on the world map with select nations possessing the capability in this strategically and economically important area, Shri. Rajeeva Ratna Shah congratulated C-DACians on achieving yet another milestone and hoped that the Success Stories & Testimonials would continue. He emphasized on the development of high end applications particularly in the field of Bioinformatics.

Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC said that C-DAC has used its hardware and systems software technologies advantageously and built its latest terascale Supercomputing system PARAM Padma, with a peak computing power of a Teraflop, with several hundred gigaflops of sustained power on internationally accepted bench-marks and storage of over 10 terabytes.

The hardware environment of PARAM Padma is powered by Compute Nodes based on the state-of-the-art Power4 RISC processors, using Copper and SOI technology, in Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) configurations. These nodes are connected through a primary high performance System Area Network, PARAMNet-II, designed and developed by C-DAC and a Gigabit Ethernet as a backup network.

The PARAM Padma is powered by C-DAC's flexible and scalable HPCC software environment. The Storage System of PARAM Padma has been designed to provide a primary storage of 5 Terabytes scalable to 22 Terabytes. The network centric storage architecture, based on state-of-the-art Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, ensures high performance, scalable and reliable storage. It uses Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) based technology for interconnecting storage subsystems like Parallel File Servers, NAS Servers, Metadata Servers, Raid Storage Arrays and Automated Tape Libraries, achieving an I/O performance of upto 2 Gigabytes/Second.

The Secondary backup storage subsystem is scalable from 10 Terabytes to 100 Terabytes with an automated tape library and support for DLT, SDLT and LTO Ultrium tape drivers. It implements a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) technology to optimize the demand on primary storage and effectively utilize the secondary storage.

The PARAM Padma system is also accessible by users from remote locations.

Following the ribbon cutting ceremony to inaugurate C-DAC's terascale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF), Shri. Shourie honored the teams of
C-DAC's members involved in designing, developing and commissioning PARAM Padma and the CTSF, at a function held at Hotel Leela Palace. Shri. Rajeeva Ratna Shah also released a compendium, chronicling C-DAC's initiatives in High Performance Computing on the occasion. Also present on the occasion was Prof. N. Balakrishnan of IISc Bangalore.

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