Indian indigenous supercomputer

[manish.pawar]

The first supercomputer from C-DAC, the PARAM (for PARAllel Machine) 8000 was introduced in 1991 with a rating of 1 Gigaflop (billion floating point operations per second). Supercomputers of ever-increasing processing power followed from C-DAC.

C-DAC was set up in 1988 with the objective of designing a supercomputer, after India's bid to purchase a supercomputer from the U.S. for weather forecasting, fell foul of U.S. restrictions on exports of high performance computers to India.

All the chips and other elements that were used in making of Supercomputer PARAM were bought from the open domestic market. The various components developed and used in the PARAM series were Sun UltraSPARC II, later IBM POWER 4 processors, Ethernet, and the AIX Operating System. The major applications of PARAM Supercomputer are in long-range weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling.

Facts about India's indigenous Supercomputer

• PARAM is one of the latest and fastest supercomputer which India Using in weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design, and molecular modeling.
• Param is also exported to countries like Russia, Ukraine, and South Korea.
• This is developed by C-DAC in India when India failed to get a supercomputer for weather forecasting from USA in 1991.
• Param is Developed by Centre for development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) - a scientific society of Government of India.

 

[manish.pawar]

Indian Supercomputer - Param Padma

PARAM is a series of supercomputers designed and assembled at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM Yuva,[1] which reached no. 109 on the TOP500 in June 2009.[2] Others include PARAM 10000 and PARAM 9000/SS and the PARAM Padma. The PARAM Padma was India's first Teraflop supercomputer. Currently, C-DAC is developing a Petaflop Supercomputer which is expected to be in operation by 2012. The biggest challenge in designing the $125 million supercomputer is handling the power consumption of the unit which is expected to be around 20MW up from the current 1MW consumption of the PARAM Yuva cluster. However, the new machine will also be able to perform up to 100 times more computations per second than the current PARAM Yuva cluster.

The major applications of PARAM are in long-range weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling.PARAM is also used in many major scientific research institutes in India and may also see use in India's space program. In addition, collaborative research and experimentation is enabled by a national computing grid known as Garuda which connects 45 institutions across 17 cities. As of 2008, 44 PARAM systems have been deployed in India. An additional 8 systems are in operation in Russia, Singapore, Germany and Canada.

SUPERCOMPUTER PARAM PADMA

C-DAC's HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communication) initiatives are aimed at designing, developing and deploying advanced computing systems, tools and technologies that impact strategically important application areas.

Fostering an environment of innovation and dealing with cutting edge technologies, C-DAC's PARAM series of supercomputers have been deployed to address diverse applications in science and engineering, and business computing at various institutions in India and abroad.

C-DAC's commitment to the HPCC initiative has once again manifest as a deliverable through the design, development and deployment of PARAM Padma, a terascale supercomputing system.

PARAM Padma is C-DAC's next generation high performance scalable computing cluster, currently with a peak computing power of One Teraflop. The hardware environment is powered by the Compute Nodes based on the state-of-the-art Power4 RISC processors, using Copper and SOI technology, in Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) configurations. These nodes are connected through a primary high performance System Area Network, PARAMNet-II, designed and developed by C-DAC and a Gigabit Ethernet as a backup network.

The PARAM Padma is powered by C-DAC's flexible and scalable HPCC software environment. The Storage System of PARAM Padma has been designed to provide a primary storage of 5 Terabytes scalable to 22 Terabytes. The network centric storage architecture, based on state-of-the-art Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies, ensures high performance, scalable and reliable storage. It uses Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) based technology for interconnecting storage subsystems like Parallel File Servers, NAS Servers, Metadata Servers, Raid Storage Arrays and Automated Tape Libraries, achieving an I/O performance of upto 2 Gigabytes/Second.

The Secondary backup storage subsystem is scalable from 10 Terabytes to 100 Terabytes with an automated tape library and support for DLT, SDLT and LTO Ultrium tape drives. It implements a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) technology to optimize the demand on primary storage and effectively utilize the secondary storage.

The PARAM Padma system is also accessible by users from remote locations.

 

[manish.pawar]

India's Fastest Supercomputer EKA

EKA is a supercomputer built by the Computational Research Laboratories with technical assistance and hardware provided by Hewlett-Packard. When it was installed in November 2007, it was the 4th fastest in the world and fastest in Asia. EKA is ranked as the 47th fastest in the world and fourth fastest in Asia. Eka is the Sanskrit name for number one.

It was reported to have cost $30 million dollars to build.

EKA has 1,794 computing nodes and has a theoretical peak performance of 172.2 Teraflops (tflops or trillion floating point operations per second) and a sustained performance of 132.8 teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the worldwide community to rank supercomputers based on performance.

EKA follows a near-circular layout of the data center unlike the traditional hot aisle and cold aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers, and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale.[citation needed] The CRL supercomputer has been built using CLOS architecture with off-the-shelf servers and Infiniband interconnect technologies with GNU/Linux as the operating system. This is the first ever site in the world which has used the dual data rate Infiniband with fibre-optic cable technology.

 

[manish.pawar]

India’s supercomputer plan for World Fastest Supercomp

India this week committed Rs 10,000 crore to indigenously develop the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2017. The Planning Commission agreed in principle to provide the funds to the Indian Space Research Organsiation (ISRO) and Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Bangalore to develop a supercomputer w
ith a performance of 132.8 exaflops (132 quintillion floating operations per second). A quintillion has 18 zeros (a million has six).

In computing, flops is an acronym to measure computing performance. An average personal computer can go up to 7.5 gigaflops.

The world’s fastest supercomputer right now is a Chinese one, which can do 2.7 pentaflops, or two quadrillion flops. A quadrillion has 15 zeros.

India in 2007 had the world’s fourth fastest indigenously-developed supercomputer with a performance of 172.5 teraflops (172 trillion flops), which has been enhanced this month to 220 teraflops. That’s still a level lower than China’s supercomputer.

The Indian supercomputer will not be used only for enhancing the country’s space abilities, it will also be used to predict monsoon and precise weather inputs to boost agriculture N Balakrishnan, associate professor at IIS-Bangalore, said the target being set is “ambitious” while referring to achieving the exaflop – or next level of computing performance -- by 2017. “We have planned everything minutely.”

“We have agreed to provide R10,000 crore for having ‘exa’ level of supercomputing facility,” minister of state for planning Ashwini Kumar told HT.

Balakrishnan, in a presentation to the plan panel, said ISRO has already booked key equipment to develop the supercomputer by 2017. “Most of the other gadgets will be indigenously developed,” he said. “Supercomputing is key to competing in the international space market,” Balakrishnan said.

Rs 10,000-crore push for India

 

[rekhagupta]

you people have given some of the craziest facts about the Indian indigenous supercomputer. I was unaware about the first indian super computer .. thanks for sharing the information with us. it is good to know the indian technology enhancement at great speed.

 

[Greatindia]

We await more of such indigenous innovations so that we can improve our standards, our reputation globally for being self sufficient in technology and most importantly being capable of producing such super machines like the other developed nations do.

 

[IamanINDIAN]

Happy to see such amazing facts, more importantly that these are made in India! It just proves the fact that we are no way behind any country in terms of innovation capability. Its just the lack of funds and availability of resources that hinders the youth of our nation to venture into innovation, research and development.