India unveils terascale supercomputer, becomes World no. 5

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 01 April 2003, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: India unveils terascale computer called PARAM Padma on Tuesday, taking the nation to the fifth place in the world to have a next generation high performance scalable supercomputing cluster. The powerful computer was dedicated to the nation by Union Minister for Disinvestment, Communications and Information Technology, Arun Shourie. PARAM Padma is housed at C-DAC's Terascale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF) in Bangalore. R K Arora, Executive Director of C-DAC, said only the US, Japan, Israel and China possess such a capability. He said the latest terascale supercomputing system has several hundred gigaflops of sustained power on internationally accepted benchmarks and storage of over 10 terabytes. According to officials, PARAM Padma is 10 times more powerful than PARAM 10000. PARAM Padma is powered by C-DAC's flexible and scalable HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communication) software environment. The system is also accessible by users from remote locations. Shourie said PARAM Padma is an "answer to the world", and highlighted new system's importance from the perspective of security-related matters.