C-Dac Develops Supercomputer

An autonomous body under the department of electronics, C-Dac, completed the design of this parallel processing supercomputer early this month, a top executive of the company said.

The machine, designed in open frame architecture was an upgradation of the

earlier parallel processing machine developed by C-Dac and christened Param-9000 with a performance of four gigaflops.

The just achieved machine of Param-9000 is a major milestone in the road map of C-Dac in achieving its ultimate goal of teraflop (1,000 gigaflop) range of supercomputers.

He said two Param-9000 machines had been delivered so far, one to Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the other to National Informatic Centre (NIC). More orders were expected in the near future as it could be utilised for a variety of applications ranging from space science to molecular modelling.

C-Dac, he said, had so far sold 32 Param supercomputers. But for the latest two machines, all others were Param-8000 and Param-8600 machines, which was in the range of megaflops to gigaflops. However, the company did not expect any more orders for Param-8000 and Param-8600 machines as it preferred to concentrate on marketing Param-9000.

On the entry of Cray supercomputers into India, the C-Dac executive said the company did not foresee any challenge to its products.

About products on display in the ongoing CSI-96 here, he said it would make available leap, an Indian language word processor programme designed by its software engineers under MS-Windows.

The programme that can be used to edit, compose, print and exchange text from one language to other will support scripts in Assamese, Bengali, Devanagiri, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Diacritic Roman, besides English.

Common phonetic keyboard overlay for all Indian scripts, immediate visual indication, charecter sequence and intelligence to distinguish between different scripts and different languages were its major advantages, he said.

The programme that has an intelligent spellchecker is the first software for Indian languages that can be adopted on any Window version. The programme is now being made available through major PC companies such as Wipro, HCL, Tulip, Cerebra and Unicorp as they were pre-loading on to new computers.

There was tremendous response for the product abroad, he said. To cite a case, he said, when the software was made available in the US, with exclusive English version, it made a sale of about 25,000 copies. Although leap was launched in June last year in India, it would be available off the shelf only by next month, he said.