India agency offers build-to-order supercomputer

The Indian government-run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has designed a parallel-processing 1 TFLOP (trillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer, scalable up to 16 TFLOPs and available on a build-to-order basis.

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.

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

These supercomputers are typically built around standard components, except for a few components like the communications co-processor, which was designed by C-DAC and fabricated abroad. While a 100 GFLOP PARAM is designed around UltraSPARC II processors from Santa Clara, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc., the new 1 TFLOP supercomputer, called the PARAM Padma, uses the Power4 processor from IBM Corp. in Armonk, New York, in a symmetric multiprocessor configuration. "The decision to shift from UltraSPARC-II to Power4 was on techno-economic grounds," said Raj Kumar Arora, executive director of C-DAC, based in Pune, India.

India is included in the Tier 3 of the U.S. HPC Export Control Policy of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC). Although the U.S. government relaxed in March this year the upper performance limit of computers that could be exported to India from 85,000 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second) to 190,000 MTOPS, imports of supercomputers comparable to the new 1 TFLOP computer designed by C-DAC are still restricted, according to Arora. "The performance of the PARAM Padma in terms of MTOPS is in the vicinity of 500,000 MTOPS," Arora added.

None of the PARAM supercomputers installed in India so far are used in defense organizations, according to Arora. "We have maintained throughout that our research is for civilian applications, and not for defense and nuclear applications," said Arora. "Some defense organizations in India have their own supercomputer projects. We see the PARAM project as helping build our self-reliance, and also to help establish India's hardware design capability."

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