From: hassan@cup.portal.com (hassan monu alam)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian,soc.culture.bangladesh,soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: Indian Computing
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 23:18:56 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)

Indian computing power

The government-owned Indian Institute of Science in 
Bangalore decided in 1987 that it needed a US$15 million 
supercomputer made by Cray Research of the US. The 
Meteorological Office in New Delhi had already acquired a 
Cray supercomputer to run a simulation of the annual South 
Asian monsoon for use in weather forecasting, and the institute 
wanted one of the number crunchers, too. But there was a catch.

The government had accepted the conditions of a US export 
licence for the Meteorological Office's supercomputer that 
called for a Cray team to monitor the machine to keep non-
authorised programs from being run on it. Washington 
demanded that this safeguard also be applied to the machine 
sought by the Bangalore institute, and New Delhi refused.

With no compromise in sight, talks between the institute and 
Cray broke down this year, and the company--which has two 
thirds of the world supercomputer market--withdrew its 
marketing team from India. In the end, the government 
apparently decided that it was not worth caving in to US 
demands.

The government's decision was made easier by a new approach 
to large-scale computing initiated in India by the government's 
Science Advisory Council. In the late 1980s, the council began 
pressing Indian research centres to find solutions to the time 
constraints posed by a conventional sequential processor, 
which functions by lining up huge numbers of simple sums m a 
queue.

For example, a sequential machine can take up t0 4 trillion 
arithmetic operations to simulate turbulent aerodynamic flows 
around an aircraft. If each task takes one millionth of second, a 
simulation can take up to 12 hours to complete.

Simulations are also becoming more demanding. The 
Meteorological Office's two-dimensional simulations of the 
South Asian monsoon, for example, are unfocused largely 
because they cover 3,600square-mile grids. But the much more 
sharply focused 900-square-mile grids being envisaged by the 
office will quadruple the number of calculations required.

Indian research centres, instead of trying to develop 
enormously fast--and expensive--sequential processors, turned 
their attention to linking small, off-the-shelf processors in a 
technique known as massively parallel processing. In this way, 
they can make machines at a fraction of the cost of such 
manufacturers as Cray and Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi of Japan.

Also, building a parallel computer is mostly a software task, an 
area where Indian capabilities are second to none. Indeed, the 
Indian computer industry currently has two massively parallel 
systems now marketed internationally.

In August 1988, the Science Advisory Council gave the Centre 
for Development of Advanced Computing, a government 
laboratory, three years to develop a parallel computer. The 
centre introduced its Param machine in October 1991. The latest 
model, the Param 8600, has 256 parallel processors and 64 
sequential processors. The machine has a peak computing 
power of six gigaflops, or 6 billion operations a second,- 
compared with the peak 16gigaflop capability of the Cray 
YMP-390 supercomputer.

In collaboration with Wipro Systems, an Indian computer-
software maker, the government's National Aeronautical 
Laboratory introduced its Flosolver computer in 1991. This 
machine, which uses five parallel processors, was designed 
primarily to solve problems in fluid dynamics and 
aerodynamics. During simulation of air turbulence, an early 
version of the machine with three parallel processors took about 
eight seconds to complete individual tasks, not far behind the 
Cray-XMP supercomputer, which clocked 3.25 seconds.

But the Flosolver has a wide range of other applications. It can 
handle image processing for robotics, as well as two-
dimensional and three-dimensional monsoon simulations.

These systems developed by the Centre for Advanced 
Computing and the National Aeronautical Laboratory were 
built from components with different technologies. The Param 
computer has transputers, or chips that have processing and 
communications capability, as the basis for its distributed 
memory-passing architecture.

The Flosolver computer has a simpler architecture. National 
Aeronautical Laboratory director R. Narasimha says this allows 
users to keep pace with developments in chips. A science 
attache in a Western embassy in New Delhi rates the computer 
highly. "Some of its software is really innovative," he says.

Cray and other computer makers, meanwhile, are building 
massively parallel systems that will advance the industry 
standard even further. One Cray prototype has 64,000 parallel 
processors, compared with just 256 in the latest Param.

Nonetheless, Indian parallel computer makers appear to have a 
sound idea of where they fit into the international market. The 
National Aeronautical Laboratory says its Flosolver is an 
alternative for institutions wanting inexpensive computing 
power

A growing number of computer-users worldwide agree. By 
March, the Centre for Advanced Computing expects to have 
sold 16 Param systems, earning a total of Rs 150 million (US$5.8 
million). In addition to 12 Indian institutions, buyers include the 
University of Bremen in Germany, the Institute of Computer-
Aided Design in Moscow and the University of New Brunswick

in Canada. Shefield University in Britain is negotiating to buy a 
Param. But the computer market changes quickly. Not to be 
outdone, Cray is rushing to introduce a supercomputer that will 
be just below the level of power that triggers US export 
controls. Cray knows it is in a tough market. In addition to the 
competition in India and established makers worldwide, a new 
group of US challengers led by Intel, Thinking Machines and 
Silicon Graphics is competing for a larger portion of the 
parallel-computer market.

"Five years ago, going for a Cray supercomputer made sense," 
says C. N. R. Rao, director of the Indian Institute of Science. 
Today, "we would have to think about whether we need it." 
The institute's Flosolver machine cost the equivalent of 
US$96,000. The Cray supercomputer for the same task sells for 
US$25 million.

by Hamish McDonald