Monday, April 7, 2003		Feature

India now a terascale supercomputing nation
Tribune News Service

Union Communication and IT Minister Arun Shourie along with IT Secretary R.R. Shah inaugurating Param Padma.

INDIA has joined the select band of four countries that have developed terascale super-computing system, with the inauguration of Param Padma, the next-generation high-performance scalable supercomputing cluster. It was built by the Centre to Develop the Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

Union Minister for Information Technology, Communications and Disinvestments, Arun Shourie, inaugurated the system with a peak computing power of one teraflop. Located at C-DAC’s newest facility Knowledge Park, Param Padma had several hundred gigaflops of sustained power on internationally accepted benchmarks and storage of over 10 terabytes.

Other countries having similar supercomputers include the USA, Japan, Israel and China.

Param Padma is about 1,000 times powerful than the first parallel processing computer Param 8000 developed by C-DAC. Its hardware is powered by computer nodes based on the state-of-the-art Power4 RISC processors using copper and SOI technology in symmetric multi-processor configurations. These nodes are connected through a primary high-performance system area network called ParamNet-II, designed and developed by C-DAC and a Gigabit Ethernet as a backup network.

Lauding the efforts of C-DAC scientists, Shourie described Param Padma as a "node of pride and reason of hope" for Indian scientists and technocrats.

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 computer 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, and servers, metadata servers, raid storage arrays and automated tape libraries, achieving an i/o performance of up to 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 drivers. It implements a hierarchical storage management (HSM) technology to optimise the demand on primary storage and effectively utilise the secondary storage. The Param Padma system is also accessible by users from remote locations.