Pune, July 5, 2001

A workshop, to review the activities of the project for the installation and usage of PARAM 10000 at twelve Premier Academic Institutions in India was organized at C-DAC, Pune, during July 5-6, 2001.

In his address, Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director C-DAC, informed that C-DAC has recently completed the installation of the PARAM 10000 at these premier academic institutes in the country. The project, sponsored by the Department of Information Technology, Government of India, at a cost of Rs. 7.2 crores, involved the setting up of a parallel computing system (peak computing power 6.4 GigaFlops) at the Indian Institutes of Technology, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur & Guwahati, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, University of Roorkee, Roorkee, Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Motilal Nehru Regional Engineering College, Allahabad and Karnataka Regional Engineering College, Surathkal. The installation of the PARAM 10000 at IIT, Kharagpur, will be commissioned on the occasion of their golden jubilee celebrations in August 2001.

Under the project, the premier institutions have identified as many as 130 different individual projects with over 200 scientists and researchers involved in diverse areas of science and engineering with a twofold objective:

i) to create awareness and generate skilled manpower in the area of parallel processing technology and applications;

ii) to aid in their research pursuits and help develop applications of interest.

C-DAC, in addition, has identified certain focus areas on which specific projects would be developed at these institutions, thereby creating areas of expertise. Further, these institutions would also build interaction with concerned industries to address their areas of interest based on the expertise developed together with C-DAC in the areas identified.

Research scientists at these premier institutes have started using the PARAM 10000 for research in the broad areas of science and technology including Weather Forecasting, Aeronautics, Structural Mechanics, Materials Research, Bioinformatics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Image Processing, Computational Chemistry and so on. C-DAC is interacting with these institutes to promote the usage of the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) of C-DAC at Pune, which houses a much larger system of PARAM 10000 having a computing power of 100 GigaFlops. This will help solve the problems, requiring larger computing power, as they scale up. C-DAC scientists presented their areas of research in science and engineering and their interaction with users in Industry and other scientific organizations to aid the project activities. This unique exercise of interaction between industries, research scientists and computer designers will provide an opportunity to demonstrate Indian capabilities in major compute intensive areas of application of interest.

An expert committee met to review the projects presented by the premier institutes and suggested ways of reinforcing the scope of this project. Several suggestions have been made in this context.

Having being associated with C-DAC since its inception, eminent scientist Prof. V. Rajaraman of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, addressed the valedictory session and discussed supercomputing technology and problems of the grand challenge category. Dwelling at length on the genesis and growth of supercomputing technology, he predicted that from the present GigaFlop technology, supercomputing has moved on to TeraFlops and the future belongs to PetaFlop technology. He emphasized that the usage of supercomputers would move from scientific computing to business computing particularly in predicting trends at the stock markets. The decade ahead in the applications of supercomputing belongs to Cosmology, Environmental Hydrology, Molecular Biology, Chemical Engineering, Nano Materials and Scientific Instrumentation. Dr. Rajaraman shared his vision in the areas of supercomputing and the grand challenge and reiterated the need for networking and collaborations.

Prof. A.S. Kolaskar, Vice Chancellor, University of Pune discussed use of supercomputing technology for solving problems in basic sciences with particular focus in emerging areas of Bioinformatics. He also addressed the temporal and spatial Data Mining issues. He emphasized on the need to address the emerging challenges and the growing need for new machines that will be required to unlock the secrets of qualitative variation in the post - Genomic era. He lauded C-DAC's efforts sharing and delivering its expertise with the 12 premier academic institutes in the country.

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