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Dated December 17, 2002
The Indian Express
India's most powerful
computer to date, PARAM Padma, is ready and will be
officially unveiled in about a month's time, according
to Shri. Rajeeva Ratna Shah, Secretary in the Central
Government's Department of Information Technology.
Built by the Centre
for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC),
PARAM Padma will have a peak computing power of one
teraflop (floating point operations per second) and
will be located at the C-DAC Knowledge Park in Bangalore.
The PARAM Padma is an improvement on PARAM
10000, built in 1996, which has a computing power
of 100 gigaflops.
Speaking after inaugurating
the Sixth International Conference/Exhibition on High
Performance Computing in the Asia Pacific Region,
Shah said the PARAM Padma could be scaled to achieve
a power of 16 teraflops.
Incidentally, the most
powerful supercomputer - built in Japan to simulate
the Earth, and study various climatic and other effects
on it - has a computing power of 36 teraflops. The most
powerful computer in the US has a power of 13 teraflops.
The thrust of India's
supercomputing work will be in areas like biotechnology,
biocomputation, nanotechnology and nanocomputation,
weather forecasting, climate modeling, fluid dynamics
for space sciences, seismic data processing and structural
mechanics, Shah said. A nanotechnological initiative
to build resources in this area has been planned, he
pointed out.
India is looking at
both a domestic and an international market for the
PARAM Padma, he said. There are, at present 52 India-made
supercomputers in use. While 45 of these are located
in India, four are in Russia, while one each are in
Canada, Germany and Singapore. The PARAM Padma costs
nearly half the international price of $10 million for
similar supercomputers.
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