PARAM - India's reply to Super Computer

PARAM is a series of supercomputers developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM Padma, which reached no. 171 on the TOP500 in 2003. Others include PARAM 10000 and PARAM 9000/SS. The PARAM 10000 was India's first TFLOPS computer.

The success of PARAM can be seen as a great example as how restrictions of scientific knowledge turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The USA's supercomputing hardware embargo of India in the early 80s forced the Indian scientists to independently develop the components required for PARAM. The various components used in the PARAM series were Sun UltraSPARC II, later IBM POWER 4 processors , Ethernet , and AIX Operating System.

C-DAC has also developed a high performance System Area Network called the PARAMNet-II having transfer speeds of up to 2.5 Gbit/s and latencies as low as 10 microseconds.

The major applications of PARAM 10000 are in long-range weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling. PARAMs in the future may well be used for India's space programme. Plans to use it for oil and gas exploration are also on the line.


Hardware Resources:

Configuration : 54 Nos. of 4-Way SMP nodes and 1 No. of 32-Way SMP node.

No. of Processors : 248 (Power 4@1GHz).

Aggregate Memory : 0.5 TeraBytes (@ 8GB per node and 64GB per large SMP node).

Internal Storage : 4.5 TeraBytes (@ 72GB per node and 576GB per large SMP node).

Operating System : AIX 5L .

Aggregate Peak Computing Power : 1005 GFs (~1 TF).