C-DAC: Press Kit - Archives(Press Releases) - C-DAC adopts Linux on IBM platform for its High Performance Computing laboratory in Bangalore

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) today announced that it is developing a world-class National High Performance Computing Laboratory utilizing Linux-ready platforms from IBM for developing applications and research in eGovernance solutions, Life Sciences, Seismic Analysis and Weather Forecasting. The selection of Linux public software and its deployment by C-DAC will provide a boost to the research activities of the scientific community in India. The laboratory is scheduled for commissioning at C-DAC's Knowledge Park in Bangalore by the end of this year.

A Memorandum of Understanding between IBM and C-DAC was signed today in New Delhi at a ceremony, which was attended by Shri. Rajeeva Ratna Shah, Secretary of the Department of Information Technology, Government of India; Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC; Shri. Michael Lawrie, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Sales & Distribution, IBM Corporation; and Shri. Abraham Thomas, Managing Director, IBM India Limited.

As part of the MoU, IBM has appointed C-DAC as a system integration partner for High Performance Computing in India. The partnership will focus on state and central government departments, education and government-funded scientific and research institutions.

C-DAC also will collaborate with IBM's India Research Laboratory in areas such as Hindi Speech Recognition, Weather Forecasting, eGovernance framework and Grid computing technologies.

IBM is the world leader in the HPC marketplace, leveraging its IT research organization and Linux-ready solution offerings including technology, hardware, software and services. C-DAC, the country's largest systems integrator for government IT projects, will leverage IBM's experience and expertise in HPC to build advanced solutions both in scientific and business computing areas.

"Today's announcement is significant to IBM since India is not only a strategic market for IBM and a very resourceful base for IT skills, but also as another area where the true value of Linux-based computing can be shown," Shri. Lawrie said. "We have worked with various governments worldwide and are seeing a shift towards Linux around the world. Linux is an integral part of IBM's strategy. Linux can scale to meet the high workload demands of even the most intensive computing tasks. This indeed is a very significant step in IBM's presence toward our eGovernance initiatives in India and our continued commitment to open source, with Linux," he added.

Shri. Thomas said, "The agreement with C-DAC reinforces IBM's leadership in High Performance Computing. C-DAC is pioneering the challenging work in the field of High Performance Computing in India and has successfully implemented many large turnkey system integration projects in India." Shri. Thomas further added "Our partnership with C-DAC will open a window of opportunity for IT implementation within the government and a host of scientific institutions. This is evidence of IBM's capabilities, technology expertise and global experience being made available to the domestic market."

Added Shri. R K. Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC, "C-DAC is engaged in setting up this laboratory, with the system design based on IBM compute nodes and C-DAC's own interconnect switch PARAMNet providing Gigabits speed and low latency. It will use the suite of HPC tools and showcase applications on LINUX and professional UNIX. This will also facilitate development of a Computational Grid. As part of its next mission C-DAC has proposed to build an IGrid, a Computational Grid which has emerged as an important new field in computing with its focus on enabling flexible, secure, interoperable, and coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of institutions, and computing resources".

IBM is the world's largest information technology company and provider of IT services, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM India Limited is amongst the leading Information Technology companies in India today. IBM India has the eBusiness capabilities, products, services and partner network to help large and small enterprises plan, build and implement the eBusiness infrastructure they need.

IBM's High Performance Computing segment includes scientific workstations, high performance systems, high-speed networks, special purpose and experimental systems, large scalable parallel systems, and application and systems software, with all components well integrated, balanced and linked with a scalable high-speed interconnect fabric.

C-DAC, has established itself as a renowned Research and Development organization with core competencies in High Performance Computing & Communications (HPCC) and other related advanced information technologies.

Pioneers of the OpenFrame Architecture and acknowledged globally for its PARAM series of Supercomputers, C-DAC has applied its HPCC expertise to the fields of Computational Atmospheric Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Structural Mechanics, Seismic Data Processing, Bioinformatics, Quantum Chemistry, Ab-initio Molecular Dynamics, Imaging, Financial Modeling and Decision Support Systems.

C-DAC's HPCC System is based on state-of-the-art industry standard compute nodes with its own designed interconnect switch PARAMNet providing high speeds and low latencies. Its HPCC software suit is designed to provide Flexible, Parallel and Distributed Software environment for Linux, Unix Clusters. The applications in different areas of science and engineering are optimized to provide the best performance on hardware and software platforms.

C-DAC's relentless R&D effort in High Performance Computing Hardware, Systems Software and Applications development has lead to the foundation of the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) at Pune, India for use by a large number of researchers countrywide. C-DAC has also spun off its technologies and skills to develop and deploy software solutions for sectors of Education, Healthcare, Power, Telecom, Agriculture, and Financial Services in its commercial operations.