| |
Dated December 18, 2002
Business Line
The Sixth
International Conference on High Performance Computing
in the APAC region, HPC Asia kicked off here.
The four-day event
will be a forum for technologists as well as the industry,
to network. With more powerful microprocessors in the
market, high power computing or supercomputing is moving
towards becoming more cost effective and powerful, said Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director, Centre for Development
of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
The market for HPC is expected to grow from the current $0.5 billion to
over $1.6 billion in India, he said.
C-DAC , which was set
up in the late eight with the specific mandate to build
an indigenous supercomputer for the country to get around
export controls, is now ready to launch a 1-teraflop
machine, called PRAM Padma.
"Today, we need
to make another investment in teaching and research
in supercomputing, as we did in the eighties,"
said Prof. Govardhan Mehta, Director, IISc.
Prof. V.S. Ramamurthy,
Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, defined
High Performance Computing as "something that I
cannot have," "What is High Performance Computing
at present, is not High Performance Computing tomorrow,"
he said, adding that the scientific community always
wanted more power than technology could provide.
The life sciences area
is expected to be one of the biggest users of high power
computing.
According to the IT
secretary, Department of Information and Technology,
Shri. Rajeeva Ratna Shah, "an IT-enabled Bioinformatics
revolution should happen in India. Besides biotech and
bio-computing, high computation power would be needed
for molecular modeling, nanotechnology and nano-computation,
atmospherics and oceanics, climate modeling, weather
forecasting, computational fluid dynamics for space
sciences applications, seismic data processing and structural
mechanics," he said.
|
|