Due to the restriction imposed on India for
importing the cray computers just for the reason it could be used for modeling
nuclear weapons, India was pushed to design its own supercomputer to show the
world its potent to race in technology. For the purpose of achieving self sufficiency in the
field, C-DAC (Center for Development for Advanced Computing) was established in
pune by the Department of Electronics in 1988. Vijay Bhatkar was hired as the Director of C-DAC. The project was given an initial run of 3 years and an
initial funding of 30,00,00,000 as the same amount of money and time was
usually expended to secure the purchase of a supercomputer from the US. In 1990, a prototype was
produced and was benchmarked at
the 1990 Zurich Supercomputing Show. It surpassed most other systems, placing
India second after US. The final result of the effort was the PARAM 8000, which was installed in 1991.
CDAC Tercomputing facility at Bangalore. |
PARAM 8000 is
considered India's first supercomputer. As of June 2012, India
has 5 systems on the Top500 list
ranking 58, 86,
129, 224 and 380.
PARAM 8000:
PARAM 8000 |
Unveiled in 1991, PARAM 8000 used Inmos 8000 transputers. Transputers were a fairly new and innovative microprocessor architecture
designed for parallel processing at the time. It distributed memory MIMD architecture
with a reconfigurable interconnection network. It had 64 CPUs.
The transputer (the name deriving from transistor and computer) was the first general purpose microprocessor designed specifically to be used in parallel computing systems. The goal was to produce a family of chips ranging in power and cost that could be wired together to form a complete parallel computer. The name was selected to indicate the role the individual transputers would play:numbers of them would be used as basic building blocks, just as transistors had earlier.
MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be executing different instructions on different pieces of data.
PARAM 8600:
PARAM 8600 was an
improvement over PARAM 8000. It was a 256 CPU computer. For every four Inmos
8000, it employed an Intel i860 coprocessor. The result was over 5
GFLOPS at peak for vector processing. Several of these models were
exported.
PARAM 9900/SS:
PARAM 9900 |
MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) refers to the use of a large number of processors (or separate computers) to perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel.
Clos network (used for communication between 200 CPUs) is a kind of multistage circuit switching network, first formalized by Charles Clos in 1953, which represents a theoretical idealization of practical multi-stage telephone switching systems. Clos networks are required when the physical circuit switching needs exceed the capacity of the largest feasible single crossbar switch.
PARAM 10000:
PARAM 10000 |
In 1998, the PARAM 10000 was unveiled. PARAM
10000 used several independent nodes, each based on the Sun Enterprise 250 server
and each such server contained two 400MHz UltraSPARC II processors. The
base configuration had three compute nodes and a server node. The peak speed of
this base system was 6.4 GFLOPS. A typical system would contain 160CPUs and
be capable of 100 GFLOPS. But, it was easily scalable to the TFLOP range.
PARAM Padma:
PARAM Padma |
PARAM Padma was introduced in April 2003. It
had a peak speed of 1024 GFLOPS (about 1 TFLOP) and a peak storage of 1 TB. It
used 248 IBM Power4 CPUs of 1 GHz each. The operating system was IBM
AIX 1.5L. It used PARAMnet II as its primary interconnect. It was the first
Indian supercomputer to break the 1 TFLOP barrier.
PARAMnet is a high speed high bandwidth low latency network developed for the PARAM series. The original PARAMnet used a 8 port cascadable non-blocking switch developed by C-DAC. Each port provided 400 Mb/s in both directions (thus 2x400 Mbit/s) as it is was a full-duplex network. It was first used in PARAM 10000.
PARAMnet II, introduced with PARAM Padma, is capable of 2.5 Gb/s while working full-duplex. It supports interfaces like Virtual Interface Architectureand Active messages. It uses 8 or 16 port SAN switches. The grid computing network GARUDA is also based on it.
PARAM Yuva:
PARAM Yuva |
PARAM Yuva was unveiled in
November 2008. It has a maximum sustainable speed (Rmax) of 38.1 TFLOPS and a
peak speed (Rpeak) of 54 TFLOPS. There are 4608 cores in it, based on Intel
73XX of 2.9 GHz each. It has a storage capacity of 25 TB up to 200
TB. It uses PARAMnet 3 as its primary interconnect.
SAGA
– 220:
SAGA - 220 |
A graphics processing unit (GPU), also occasionally called visual processing unit (VPU), is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles.
EKA:
EKA |
EKA is a supercomputer built by the Computational Research Laboratories (a subsidiary of Tata Sons) with technical assistance and hardware provided by Hewlett-Packard.
EKA uses 14,352 cores based on the Intel QuadCore Xeon processors. The primary interconnect is Infiband 4x DDR. EKA occupies about 4000 sq. feet area. It was built using offshelf components from Hewlett-Packard, Mellanox and Voltaire Ltd. It was built within a short period of 6 weeks.
At the time of its unveiling, it was the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world and the fastest in Asia. As of 16 September 2011, it is ranked at 58.
Wipro SUPERNOVA:
The product is offered under 3 segments: entry level, mid-segment and high-end, which have varying performance and storage capacities. The entry level system costs INR 2,500,000; and performs at 1 TeraFLOPS and has a storage capacity of 4 TB. They use the Gluster software stack.
The GlusterFS architecture aggregates compute, storage, and I/O resources into a global namespace. Each server plus attached commodity storage (configured as DAS, JBOD, or SAN) is considered to be a node. Capacity is scaled by adding additional nodes or adding additional storage to each node. Performance is increased by deploying storage among more nodes. High availability is achieved by replicating data n-way between nodes.