From: swamy@cs.ubc.ca (H.V. Sreekantaswamy)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Cray-Deprived Indian Institute Hits 6 GFLOPS With MPP
Date: 22 Dec 1992 22:46:47 -0800
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: logic.cs.ubc.ca

Here is an interesting article on parallel processing activities in India,
from High Performance Computing wire ( HPCwire ).

--Swamy

********************

Dec 22 125 lns
Cray-Deprived Indian Institute Hits 6 GFLOPS With MPP
By Norris Parker Smith
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  The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India's Silicon Mango Grove,
was unable to purchase a Cray supercomputer because the U.S. and Indian
governments could not agree on procedures for preventing use of the system
for military applications.
  Beginning in 1988, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing
inaugurated a program to meet its computational needs with massively parallel
(MPP) systems.
  A recent article in the Hong Kong-based (and American-owned; it is a Dow-
Jones subsidiary) Far Eastern Economic Review described the results of this
and other Indian MPP projects:
  * The Param, developed at the Centre, a distributed-memory, message-passing
system based on transputers, was introduced in October 1991.
  * Its latest version, the Param 8600, has 256 parallel processors and 64
sequential processors. The reported hypothetical peak speed is 6 GFLOPS.
  Ironically, the Centre is nibbling modestly at potential export markets for
U.S.-made MPP systems. Three Param machines have been sold abroad, to the
University of Bremen in Germany, the Institute of Computer-Aided Design In
Moscow and, in Canada, the University of New Brunswick. Sheffield University
in the U.K. is negotiating with the Centre for a Param placement.
  * The Flosolver system was developed at the National Aeronautical
Laboratory in collaboration with Wipro Systems (India's Microsoft and EDS
combined), initially for fluid dynamics applications. Also introduced in
1991, the Flosolver is a multiprocessor with five CPUs. An earlier three-CPU
version was said to deliver CFD results in about the same wall-clock time as
a Cray X-MP.
  Indian researchers say that the Flosolver is also suitable for image
processing in robotics and simulations of the monsoon in 3-D as well as 2-D.
  The turn toward MPP grew out of an examination of India's strengths and
weaknesses, the Review article said.
  India lacks the strengths in advanced hardware design and semiconductor
production found in Japan, Europe and the United States. Yet India is very
strong in software, and MPP was perceived as primarily a software challenge.
  Companies like Wipro Systems, typically located in Bangalore, use satellite
dishes to pick up software assignments sent by American firms. Bangalore is
awake while San Jose sleeps, so many projects can be completed and zapped
back across the Pacific where American code writers can contemplate the
results as soon as they turn on their workstations and sip the first post-
commute coffee of the morning.
  In addition to exploiting the fact that the world is round, Indian software
entrepreneurs are able to hire high-quality talent at low wages: $450 to $600
a month for an experienced hand.

Sophisticated Stagnation
  Somewhat like China in the 1960s and 1970s, India has deployed the talent
and resources needed to establish a remarkably sophisticated -- if narrow --
technological foundation despite overall economic stagnation and rigid
bureaucratic controls.
  India devotes somewhat under 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product to
R&D, well below the more industrialized countries but high for a developing
country. The sheer size of India means that its GDP is also substantial; less
than 1 percent for R&D added up to about $2.3 billion in 1991.
  Efficiency has been diminished, because 80 percent of R&D is carried out in
government laboratories, where promotion is based on seniority, objectives
are set by higher levels, the luncheon breaks are long, and encouragement for
fresh ideas is rare indeed.
  About half of total government research is carried out by the departments
of defense, space and atomic energy.
  India, intensely preoccupied with presumed adversaries to the north and
west, has applied much of this effort to the two dreadful totems of 20th
century power: a rocket program (which has had one useful spinoff, a
potentially cost-effective communications satellite venture) and the
capability to explode atomic weapons.
  In another irony, these successes have reduced India's ability to obtain
research tools from abroad. The gigaflop police of the U.S. commerce and
defense departments have been consistently anxious that supercomputers
ostensibly bought by India for pure scientific research might also be used to
build better bombs and more lethal rockets.
  After lengthy negotiations and political interventions at the highest
level, the U.S. authorities agreed to permit Cray Research to sell a
supercomputer to the Meteorological Office, where it is used to simulate the
annual monsoon weather patterns that are so crucial to the welfare of
hundreds of millions of Indians.
  The U.S. approval was contingent upon the presence of a Cray team at the
site to assure that cycles were not diverted to disapproved ends. Similar
arrangements were proposed for the Indian Institute of Science, but the
Indian government refused.
  Suspension of these negotiations earlier in 1992 were perhaps stimulated in
part by a recognition by the Indian authorities that India's advances in MPP
made the Cray procurement less essential.

Self-Sufficiency
  India has also suffered from an affliction found until recently in other
developing countries: the bugaboo of self-sufficiency.
  For example, India set forth in 1984 to develop its own digital exchanges
to relieve the country's grave shortage of telephones: one line for every 155
people, perhaps one-tenth the coverage in Korea and one-fortieth the
telephonic density of Hong Kong.
  In a regrettably very Indian way, the deal was set up with then-prime
minister Rajiv Gandhi by an Indian repatriate who had been a successful
communications entrepreneur in the United States.
  Seven years and $60 million later, the project's systems had one-fifth the
capacity of exchanges made in Europe or Japan. Foreign bidders have since won
a contract to supply equipment for the first phase of a planned 15-million-
line addition to the current five million lines.

New Courses
  Indians watched with astonishment and dismay as the communist system in
Eastern Europe and the former USSR, to apply a worn local metaphor, climbed
up the rope of Marxism and disappeared. They recognized that India might soon
be left the only major centrally planned economy in the world.
  Even though theirs is a bureaucratized centralism born from the London
School of Economics circa the 1930s rather than Lenin's seminars in
Petrograd, circa 1917, the consequences can be equally stultifying.
  India has accordingly bowed to the free-market yoke of the International
Monetary Fund and adopted comprehensive measures to reduce obstacles to
international trade and foreign investment. One consequence has been a
substantial increase in investment by foreign computer companies; many, like
Texas Instruments, are located in Bangalore.
  Unfortunately, India has proven to a deplorable degree the truth of the
simple syllogism: government licences for everything result in government
corruption when anyone wants to accomplish anything.
  The joys of cool air and agreeable surroundings in Bangalore are tempered
by frequent power outages, the difficulty of operating a telephone or
otherwise interacting with the government without paying frequent, generous
bribes, and  -- in an ironic reflection of Silicon Valley across the seas --
traffic jams.
  The sheer talent of the Indian people, magnified by India's still-
formidable educational system, nevertheless make Bangalore in particular and
India's broader scientific and engineering capability very attractive assets.
  What might happen if India's software specialists learn how to turn out
good MPP compilers before their counterparts abroad? Don't count on it -- but
don't rule it out.



Copyright 1992 by HPCwire. All rights reserved.

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