India8217;s new address: Supercomputer.com

PUNE, March 28: Asia's biggest supercomputer, the Param-10000, was unveiled here today, placing India among an exclusive club of countries w...

PUNE, March 28: Asia8217;s biggest supercomputer, the Param-10000, was unveiled here today, placing India among an exclusive club of countries with supercomputer capability.

The importance of the development has to be seen against the background of the ban placed by the Clinton administration on export of high performance computers. 8220;With the development of Param-10000, India is confident of building its own high-end computers for solving mission critical problems,8221; said Vijay Bhatkar, the man who led India8217;s supercomputer revolution and also executive director of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing C-DAC.

The successful development of the 100 gigaflops supercomputer, which can perform hundred thousand million mathematical operations per second, is expected to open floodgates for the nation in advanced scientific research and space programme given its numerous applications in the area of science, engineering, industry, business and commerce. One of the most significant of these in expected tobe in the country8217;s medium range weather forecasting programme as the 10 day weather forecasting models could be run on 8 processor Param-10000 in just about five minutes as against 15 minutes on the Cray XMP machine at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

The very first order for the Param-10000 has come from the National Informatics Centre which will use the machine for remote sensing, image processing and Geographical Information Systems. Earlier, when C-DAC exhibited the machine at Moscow8217;s Institute for Computer-Aided Design ICAD, Russian scientists were greatly impressed by it. In fact, a Russian team is expected in Pune shortly to negotiate purchase of a larger version.

The Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has already decided to install the Param-10000 for its engineering project. C-DAC is involved in developing a total financial simulation testbed for this project, based on the Param-10000 worth Rs 55 million.