From: reddy@mips.com (T.S. Reddy)
Newsgroups: misc.news.southasia
Subject: India's Supercomputer Is Now On A Commercial Production Line
Date: 11 Apr 92 14:05:25 GMT
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, California


* forwarded from soc.culture.iranian - Contributor's Note.

From	: T.S.Reddy
Date	: April 10, '92 
Country	: India

* India to set up Patent Database
* India producing own Supercomputer

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* India to set up Patent Database

NEW DELHI, INDIA, 1992 APR 8 (NB) -- Patent Information System is 
expected to have computer readable and searchable databases of Indian 
patents in three years from now.

The Union government, in collaboration with the World 
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and United Nations 
Development Programme, has planned a $1 million modernization 
program for the Indian Patent Office in Nagpur in central 
India. According to WIPO experts, Daid C. Newton and Jaine 
Sevilla, the best solution is to set up a national system 
for Indian documents not covered in any on-line database. The 
system could depend on an on-line foreign host for 
non-Indian documents and gradually cover documents of foreign 
patent offices. 

At present, it operates with microfilms or paper-based databases of 
about 30 million patent documents from various parts of the world and 
in many languages, with one million documents being added every year. 
Computerization will not only reduce inaccuracies, but will also make 
it easily accessible.

* India Producing Own Supercomputer

NEW DELHI, INDIA, 1992 APR 8 (NB) -- India's own supercomputer is 
now on a commercial production line. Last week, the Pune and
Bangalore-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing 
(CDAC), a government-aided mission, displayed two of its recently 
developed supercomputing products in New Delhi - Param and Paras.

Param is a massively parallel processing computer and Paras is a 
parallel applications development tool. The Param 8600 series, 
which uses a combination of INMOS transputers and Intel's i860 
chip, is capable of providing a scalable performance of about six
gflop (peak) over 3000 mips (peak). It has 256 processing nodes, 
each with a 32-bit integer processor with a 64-bit floating point
processor.

"Developing such a powerful system was a dream four years 
ago,'' said Sam Pitroda, advisor, technology missions, to the 
prime minister and an erstwhile telecom czar. (He has recently fallen 
out of the official favour due to several controversies raked up 
by the press about his CDOT -- Centre for Development of Telematics --
that has been in pursuance of designing and developing India's 
own digital switching systems.) "Today, it is a classic example 
of self-reliance,'' he added. What he didn't mention was 
controversy. Quite a few eyebrows were raised, when CDAC 
announced Indian entry into the "supercomputing era" in August 
1990 with its 64-node parallel machine. Internally, controversies 
arose about the system architecture. Its software brain A. Paulraj, 
director of the Bangalore unit, resigned in disgust to move to 
Stanford University a few months ago. Even now, some question 
Param's power as it is claimed to be. But, it has undoubtedly launched 
India into the league of nations with competence to develop computers 
with computational power beyond 1000 mflops.

Param series of supercomputers has been designed for large-
scale scientific and engineering applications like image 
processing, computational fluid dynamics, remote sensing, 
oil reservoir modelling, seismic data processing, finite 
element analysis, and signal processing. CDAC has already 
received orders from the Institute of Computer-aided Designing 
of Russia, University of Bremmen, Germany, and National 
Physical Laboratory, Delhi. And the centre has signed with a 
Pune-based firm, Thermax Ltd., transferring the technology to 
manufacture Param which means "super" in Sanscrit - India's 
ancient and holy language. 

Tata Unisys Ltd. has also taken CDAC's parallel processing 
technology to incorporate into its Unix machine, U6000 range.


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