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India's First Commercial Supercomputer Running Linux

Posted by Roblimo on from the inevitable-advances dept.

RuntimeError writes "It says here in Times of India that a gentleman in Bangalore, India has created the country's first commercial supercomputer based on the Linux operating system."

6 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Linux avoids US export restrictions by gbnewby · · Score: 4

    What's cool about Beowulf is that it lets non-US countries have access to supercomputers that they otherwise could not buy from the US. There are still significant restrictions in place that prevent many companies and governments outside of the US from buying high-end computers.

    A /. article last year mentioned that Clinton had raised the limit on what's considered a supercomputer (so today's standard microprocessors can be sold), but it's still a problem.

    Yes, Japanense companies (Fujitsu, Hitachi) make some very good supercomputers too. But my point is that places that want to have world-class supercomputers (at least the type that Beowulf offers) can now do so without needing to dance with US commerce restrictions to buy from SGI/CRAY, IBM, Compaq/Digital or HP.

    For the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, see top500.org.

  2. Also experenced with time travel.... by Xenex · · Score: 5

    "What Jayachandra has developed with help of a band of committed computer professionals -- who have had extensive Linux training in the US for about 10 years -- operates on the easy-to-learn Linux technology."

    10 years of "extensive Linux training" huh? 10 YEARS?!? They've also got 12 years of programming skills with Java, and 9 years experence using Windows 2000....

    And, how come India has the "easy-to-learn Linux technology", but i'm stuck with this non-so-easy distrubution....

    (OK, I'll stop now, this is humour though, don't get too upset :)

  3. NRI != National Research Institute by rsidd · · Score: 4
    In India, NRI is a common abbreviation for "Non Resident Indian"
    -- ie an Indian citizen who lives abroad. This gaffe is
    hilarious. If you don't know, ask.


    I believe there are some Beowulfs running in some research
    institute. This guy has slapped together some boxes and
    plans to sell them. Maybe he'll do well, maybe not.

  4. Big surprise by heroine · · Score: 4

    Well when Beowolf was temporarily banned in 1998 for fear of it being used to develop nuclear weapons in India, who would have thought that 2 years later we'd be reading about it in a positive article. NASA even deleted the home page for beowolf and we had a college student ftp server uprising much like the DVD uprising of 1999. It's good to see that what was once a security threat is now a triumph. Or maybe the columnist wasn't around in 1998.

  5. PARAM and Bewoulf by azeem_k · · Score: 3

    I believe this guy is just trying to get onto the linux bandwagon. Bewoulf clusters have been done before in India in research institutes like IISc Bangalore and India's PARAM computers based on a self-developed OS and Sun Sparc CPUs and have been exported by India to several other countries including Russia and in Europe. The overuse of hyperbole in the article suggests that the writer of the article is not too-computer literate. What this guy is just going to do is build Bewoulf clusters and sell them just like VA Linux does. He has done a very good job of getting the publicity and marketing though.

    1. Re:PARAM and Bewoulf by shri · · Score: 3

      Yes, this is true. The Param has been out there for quite a while, running on a SPARC based architecture. This is just one more moron jumping on the Linux bandwagon. Having said this, hopefully it inspires some of the mainstream companies like Wipro etc to jump on and release Linux based platforms. Any publicity is good, however a note to the folks reading about Linux in India for the first time, be paitent, our reporters are just as bad as some of the folks on ZDNET when they began their Linux coverage. With Oracle, Sybase and IBM providing their enterprise class software on Linux, Linux should really be the platform of choice for training computer professionals and students in India. We need a major initiative in India funded by the private industry to take a look at developing Linux as an alternative platform by contributing Hindi and other language capabilities to the code base. I actually find it hard to NOT find a single sector in India which would not benefit from having Linux as the preffered or alternative platform of choice.