Pune, March 18, 1999

Continued...

Let me share with you the happiest moment of all of us at C-DAC in this year. The Government, bestowing their continued confidence in us, has approved our Third Mission. A Mission with a change. One in which we focus on technology building and application building.

The overall scope of the Mission falls in four categories:

• Advanced technologies for Next Generation High Performance Computing and Communication - it is here that we see a change in our approach.
• National PARAM Supercomputing Facility – which will be dedicated to the nation soon, which houses PARAM 10000 to be available to various users in the country.
• Applications development – three areas – Mission Critical, Science & Engineering and Business applications.
• Collaborative initiatives & infrastructure building – collaboration with Academic Institutions, and building a World Class high-end R&D facility, with a vision of a top-end IT solution providing institution.

We are extremely thankful to Shri. Ravindra Gupta for spearheading the Government's approval of this Mission with a conviction.

What are the advanced or next generation technologies that we are talking about? These are something on the ground:

• We adopted workstations as a compute node in PARAM 10000.
• We are now using Commodity PC elements such as the emerging Intel Chips and other advanced processors available from multiple sources.
• In a record time of less than four months (we started this exercise in November 1998) we have put together a system - PARAM 10000P – an 8 node, 16 processor, OpenFrame scalable system with PARAMnet switch, with our own operating & programming environment having 10 Flop power.
• The focus is on System Area Network (SAN) to produce ultra-fast, low latency switch with very low communication overheads.
• Also, to build hardware programmable libraries to map the application algorithms to derive the best throughput from the parallel machine.
• In this approach, we "build the technology to build supercomputers". This will help generate a know-how package, which we could provide to the institutions, industry or users to build their own machine suitable to their own needs – that is the key.

I congratulate Mr. P.R. Eknath, Dr. Ajit Karnik, Mr. Sanjay Wandhekar, Mr. Vinodh Kumar, Mr. Ashish Kuvelkar, Mr. N. Mohanram, Mr. Nitin Parab and all other members of the N-19 project Task Force, directly and indirectly associated with this project for their contribution.

There is a lot of work ahead in this direction, and we dedicate ourselves to accomplish this task.