From: mohan@phi.mel.dms.CSIRO.AU (Mohan Krishnamoorthy)
Subject: India produces Supercomputer
Keywords: india supercomputer production
Organization: CSIRO, Div. of Mathematics & Statistics, Melbourne, Vic., AUSTRALI
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 01:37:43 GMT

The following news item may have appeared in this newsgroup earlier. 
Still, for those who may have missed it, the following piece is
reproduced from 'CRAY Tales', A News Bulletin from CRAY Research
Asia Pacific.

(All typos and scanning errors are mine.  
 All syntax and factual errors are theirs!)

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INDIA PRODUCING SUPERCOMPUTER:

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 producing 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 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 Bremen, 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 Sanskrit -- 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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/Mohan 

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Disclaimer:  All views expressed here represent my own except when they don't
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Every 4 seconds a woman has a baby.  Where _is_ she?
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Mohan Krishnamoorthy, CSIRO, Division of Mathematics and Statistics,
Private Bag 10, Clayton, Melbourne, VIC 3168, Australia.
Phone: +61 3 542 2263; 	email: mohan@mel.dms.CSIRO.AU
-------
Mohan Krishnamoorthy, CSIRO, Division of Mathematics and Statistics,
Private Bag 10, Clayton, Melbourne, VIC 3168, Australia.
Phone: +61 3 542 2263; 	email: mohan@mel.dms.CSIRO.AU