C-DAC: Press Kit - Archives(In the News) - C-DAC develops upgraded PARAM version

India has written a fresh chapter in its history of supercomputer by developing a one teraflop High Performance scalable computing cluster.

Housed in a Terascale Supercomputing Facility, at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC's) Knowledge Park in Bangalore, this next generation of the now well-known PARAM series has been nicknamed PARAM Padma.

Padma, in Indian mythology stands for 10 to the power of 12. One teraflop or 1000 Gigaflops stands for 1 trillion floating point operations per second. To put it simply, calculations which a normal PC would take 6 months to perform would be done in a matter of minutes on this supercomputer. Speaking to ET on the eve of the 6th International Conference and Exhibition on High Performance Computing Asia 2002, Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC, said that PARAM teraflop is the largest machine in the Asia Pacific region, outside Japan developed by the country."

With PARAM Padma, capability is likely to revolutionize India's efforts in Bioinformatics, Weather Forecasting, Seismic Data Processing for oil exploration, Structural Mechanics and Computational Fluid Dynamics. 2D and 3D modeling of the Earth's crust, drug designing through molecular modeling, thermal design of turbines, nuclear reactors, blast furnaces in steel plants and simulation of space objects are some specific applications in these areas.

Developed at a cost of Rs.50 Crore over 4 years, with 200 scientists working full-time on the project, the supercomputer shows that India has overcome international trade imperatives imposed on it. At present, there are restrictions that prevent import of machines with power beyond 195, 000 mtops (million theoretical operations per second). The PARAM Padma stands at 500,000 mtops and boasts of 250 processors. What is of real pride is that two crucial technologies that control the teraflop machine have been indigenously developed. One is the interconnect Switch - PARAMNet II and two, the entire suite of systems software tools including management, debugging, compiling and engineering solutions.

Says Shri. Arora, "This development is testimony that we possess state-of-the-art technology in cluster computing and parallel processing." While the former denotes the architecture, the latter refers to the processing. While older technology on which CRAY is built (vector processing) is being phased out, some countries like Japan which has developed Earth simulator - a 40 teraflop computer is now adopting hybrid models) (a mix of the two technologies) in their research and development efforts. US is also ahead in the race with 7-13 teraflop machines nicknamed ASCII Blue and ASCII White. Israel, Germany and China are new players in the supercomputing arena.

While PARAM Padma would be unveiled at the exhibition tomorrow in the presence of a number of delegates to HPC 2002, top officials from the Indian Meteorological Department and ONGC are also expected to arrive to negotiate for the purchase of PADMA, which will carry a price tag of Rs. 25 Crore.