C-DAC: Press Kit - In the News

You could call it the mother of all computer networks but that is exactly what the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), has set about to build over the next nine months.

To beset up in an initial investment of Rs. 120 crore, Project iGrid will be India's first grid-computing project that will link up 15 supercomputers across the country putting a combined computing power upwards of 1,000 gigaflops (floating operations per second), at the disposal of Indian scientific and commercial establishments. The proposal for the futuristic project has been appraised by the Ministry of C&IT recently and a formal approval and grant of the funds is awaited, the C-DAC Executive Director, Shri. R.K. Arora told ET.

Apart from the participating scientific institutions, private and public sector companies will be good users for the proposed grid-computing network. Apart from the public sector BHEL, ONGC and Telco are among the likely companies to use the highly sophisticated system, he said. Grid networks allow users to share processing power over a network similar to the way information can be shared over the Internet. Such networks give users at far-flung terminals access to supercomputing power currently available to only a few researchers at chosen facilities.

Computers to be 10 times faster

Hyderabad:
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), will soon unveil next generation supercomputers ten times the speed of the current PARAM 10000 series. Computer scientists at the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility of C-DAC are working on a new version of the computer that will be ten times the speed of the successful earlier version. The supercomputer will be ready by the end of 2002, he said. The PARAM 10000 crunches numbers at a speed of 110 gigaflops or 110 billion floating point operations per second making it one of the fastest computers in the world. The PARAM was developed indigenously after difficulties in sourcing the Cray XMP range of supercomputers from the U.S. The PARAM is based on the SunSparc workstation processing elements. There are over 20 such systems located at various centers in India and abroad. C-DAC, had also launched the PARAM Anant and the PARAM 10000 range of cost effective supercomputers in 2000 based on off-the-shelf low cost Intel Pentium Processor based machines providing identical environments as the UltraSparc based PARAM 10000.