IT
Scan
January
15, 2003
C-DAC to launch PARAM-Padma supercomputer
BANGALORE -- Supercomputing or high power computing
(HPC) for intense scientific research that requires
tremendous processing power in terms of teraflops
(a trillion floating point operations per second)
was earlier meant for research in weather forecasting
or computational atmospheric sciences. The HPC onslaught
in India has been steered by C-DAC (Centre for Development
of Advanced Computing) with its PARAM series of supercomputers.
India is now ready to launch the one teraflop PARAM-Padma
supercomputer. It also has a huge potential for exports
to the global market.
Speaking
at the inauguration of high performance computing
(HPC) Asia 2002, Rajeeva Ratna Shah, secretary, department
of IT, union ministry of communications and IT, said,
"We are looking at both domestic and overseas
markets. We will offer solutions to countries that
need supercomputing power. Fifty-two PARAM series
machines are currently in use -- 45 in India, four
in Russia and one each in Germany, Canada and Singapore."
RK Arora, executive director of C-DAC, added, "The
PARAM-Padma is priced at $5mn for the overseas market
which is half the international price."
PARAM-Padma
is C-DAC's next-generation, high performance scalable
computing cluster with a computing power of one teraflop.
Shah said: "PARAM-Pamda can be scaled up to 16
teraflops and will be launched in one month's time.
The government had allocated Rs. 130 crore for the
supercomputing area in the tenth plan (2002-2007).
There were plans to come out with an India nano initiative
under which a core facility would be established in
the country with over half-a-dozen regional centres
dealing in areas such as nano electronics, nano computing,
nano informatics and nano electromechanical systems.
"
HPC
is used in large organisations like FedEx or pharma
companies to get their drugs into the market as fast
as possible. The Param is being used by scientists
to simulate blood circulation in a human body. It
will help in understanding the causes of cardiac ailments.
The HPC domain is no longer dominated by mere theory
and experiments. Commercial projects like supply chain
management (SCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP),
product life cycle management (PLM) and customer relationship
management (CRM) are using supercomputing abilities
to come out with applications for the business environment.
Dr
Tilak Agarwala, vice president, TJ Watson Research
Lab, IBM, US, noted: "The buzz right now is,
however complex the task is on hand, it has to be
completed in record time. And, there should be no
room for errors. For instance, in life sciences, for
protein folding, using a petaflop machine -- which
can handle 1,000 trillion operations per second can
complete a part of the project in one year. On a teraflop
machine, it will take 1,000 years, and who is going
to be there to use it if it takes that long anyway.
At least 50 academic institutions in India are teaching
HPC at graduate/post graduate levels. India has committed
an investment of $50mn for the world's biggest particle
accelerator that would be built in Geneva in 2005."
Besides
delivering detectors, India will be manufacturing
components for the accelerator, software for controller
and software development for simulator. It has been
allowed to participate in the building of the accelerator,
undertaken by a European consortium, with scientists
from the country being able to participate in major
grid physics programme. Once built, the accelerator
will look at the fundamental structure of the material
world and experiments will be conducted for a decade.
