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Dated December 17, 2002
The Hindu
India's most powerful
computing platform PARAM Padma, capable of a peak 1
teraflop that is 1,000 billion floating point operations
per second, is ready and working.
The Union Secretary
for Information Technology, Shri. Rajeeva Ratna Shah,
announced this today at the inauguration of the 6th
International Conference on High
Performance Computing in the Asia Pacific region
(HPC
Asia 2002), being held in India for the first time.
The computing behemoth
has been developed by the Pune based Centre for Development
of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
and is currently functioning in the Centre's Bangalore
based Terascale Supercomputing Facility.
The formal inauguration
of the machine is yet to take place. It comes a decade
after the C-DAC began work on its mandate to create
'desi' supercomputers using parallel processing.
Till date, 52 PARAM series machines are in use in India and, of these, seven
are installed in four foreign countries. Russia has
purchased every one of the four versions that the series
has gone through while scaling up from on megaflop to
one teraflop. The latest 'avtaar' of PARAM uses 248
processors working in parallel and the sustained computing
power using standard benchmarks is in "several
hundred gigaflops".
It will fill vital
slots in Indian efforts in protein modeling, genome
sequencing and weather prediction, Mr. Shah added.
Shri. R.K. Arora, C-DAC's Executive Director, suggested
that supercomputing - or High Performance Computing
to use the current buzzword - would increasingly be
achieved in a collaborative way using grids of smaller
computers.
Tomorrow's cutting
edge computers would have to work harder (through better
processors), be cleverer (through more complex algorithms)
and operate in a more cooperative way (through girds
and clusters), he said.
In his inaugural remarks,
the Union Science and Technology Secretary, Shri. V.S.
Ramamoorthy suggested that the I-Grid or India grid
of computers being anchored by C-DAC be broadened to
assume a more pan-Asian role, in cooperation with other
nations in the region.
The HPC conference,
which continues till December 19, has drawn contributions
from all major Indian and Asian institutions working
in High Performance Computing as well as global IT industry
leaders such as IBM, Intel, Sun, Microsoft and Silicon
Graphics.
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