INDIAN SUPERCOMPUTERS

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

PARAM 9900/SS was designed to be a MPP system. It used the SuperSPARC II processor. The design was changed to be modular so that newer processors could be easily accommodated. Typically, it used 32-40 processors. But, it could be scaled up to 200 CPUs using the ‘clos network topology’. PARAM 9900/US was the UltraSPARC variant and PARAM 9900/AA was the DEC Alpha variant.

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

SAGA-220 is a supercomputer built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). As of May 2011, it is the fastest supercomputer in the nation with a maximum theoretical speed of 220 TFlops. The name SAGA-220 stands for Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture - 220 teraflops. It was built using commercially available hardware, open source software components and in house developments. The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla C2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by WIPRO. Each NVIDIA Tesla C2070 GPU is capable of delivering 515 gigaflops compared to the Xeon CPU’s more modest contribution of 50 gigaflops. The system cost about INR 140,000,000 to build. The system consumes only about 150 kW.

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.