Supercomputer Unveiled

With the successful development of its second supercomputer, India has joined the select league of nations moving forward in the strategic field of supercomputing.

The unveiling of Param 10,000 supercomputer by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) here on Saturday, has not only given a boost to the countrys image in information technology but also reinforced its self-confidence in developing advanced technologies.

The technology for the machine which can perform 100,000,000,000 mathematical operations per second (gigaflops), currently exists only with the US and Japan, according to V P Bhatkar, executive director, C-DAC.

The architecture of Param 10,000 is scaleable to teraflops level wherein one trillion operations can be performed in a second. In other words, such a machine can perform 20,000 million operations by the time one bats an eyelid.

In 1986-87, Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, had asked the department of electronics (DoE) to initiate the parallel processing project. As a result, C-DAC came into being in 1988 and the first supercomputing mission was launched.

In 1991, C-DAC delivered the first supercomputer, Param 8,000, with a computing power of one gigaflops. Param 10,000 is an enhancement over Param 9000 delivered in 1997 with a computing power of 10 gigaflops.

Earlier, Europe had launched a similar project under the high performance computing networking initiative, but they have yet to come out with their teraflops machine, Bhatkar said.

To promote Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the US had also launched the advanced supercomputing initiative to build teraflops machines.

Two US firms, SGI-CRAY and IBM, have already built such machines to simulate nuclear tests and carry out stockpile simulation of nuclear weapons without physical tests.

Currently, all high performance computers with power exceeds 2,000 mega theoretical operations per second, require clearance from the department of commerce, US, for export to more than 50 countries with specific restrictions for India, according to Bhatkar.

Param 10,000 has diverse applications. The Oil and Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) has successfully tested a seismic data processing software on this machine on an operational scale.

Applications in the field of healthcare are hospital information systems, 3-d treatment planning system for radiotherapy, simulated surgery and telemedicine.

Business applications of the supercomputer include data-warehousing for the Reserve Bank, financial

simulation for capital markets and customer care and billing systems for telecommunication companies.

The machine can take care of energy management systems in power distribution for load forecasting, stability analysis and grid management. A complete system is being developed for Punjab state electricity board, according to C-DAC.

Other applications are in the fields of numerical weather forecasting, geosynchronous satellite launch vehicle design, digital elevation modeling for satellites for cartographic applications, synthetic aperture radar data processing, remote sensing and geographic information systems.

The machine is being particularly used for molecular modeling and fluid dynamics problems in genetic engineering which has potential applications in the field of medicine, A S Kolaskar, director, bioinformatics centre of university of Pune, said.

Param 10,000 performs better as compared to well-known supercomputers in the US, he said.

C-DAC, with the establishment of the National Param Supercomputing Facility inside the Pune University campus, now plans to start collaborative projects with leading educational institutions and research labs to solve some of the domestic technological problems.

With Russia and Singapore, keen to procure the Param machine, C-DAC looks forward to more clients in the

third-world with a vision to use this in the formation of the National Information Infrastructure, its next mission.