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India Plans A Supercomputing Grid
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article at CNET, India is building a country-wide High Speed Network. Named the "I-Grid" (I is for 'Information' silly !), its a feat for the Indians who have been bogged down by U.S. sanctions in the recent past -- besides, with a country as big as theirs, its one helluva project!"
Where will they go for contractors when the project is 6 months behinds schedule and 50 million over budget? Will they farm out the programming to Pakistan? China? I need answer.
India's new i-Grid follows a long line of previously successfull Apple products, the i-Pod and the i-Mac being two of them.
:: GNUs For Nerds. Flawless Grammar.
When reached for comment, Apple's visionary Steve Jobs stated that his engineers "would worry about the technical difficulties" associated with such a large distributed system after they "dealt with the more important stuff first, like what fluorescent color to make the transparent wires and stuff".
monolinux.com
There is no doubt in my mind that India is the next big superpower.
(1) Lots of unspoilt natural resources
(2) Smart People
(3) Most Important (A LOT OF PEOPLE)
(4) and it doesn't hurt they speak english allowing them to segue their way in.
My premise..? Numbers don't lie. A giant market is a giant period. This prediction does cover China too, their population makes them a sleeping giant. Except that China does not have an open society. India is struggling against years of exploitation and it's own caste system... but given the adoption of democracy there I can't imagine it won't arrise from these difficulties and when it does, it will have more resources than anyone will be able to (or want to) stop.
-pyrrho
First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world.
Second, India is less likely to use Nukes than Pakistan -- and U.S. citizens can thank the CIA for giving Pakistan nuke technology. Look up "Gary Powers" in your history books. His U-2 that was shot down over Russia began its flight in Pakistan. The U.S. has been in thick with Pakistan and less-than-honest deeds since. Pakistan was also a favored point for inserting people into the old U.S.S.R, and it touches China, making for more flight options to bases in Japan.
Back during the previous Bush presidency, India and Pakistan were in another heightened state of alert. Pakistan had fighter jets sitting on the tarmac, hot-seating pilots in 2-hour shifts, waiting for the word to sprint across the border and hit large cities like Delhi and Bombay. The previous President Bush, who understood the world far better than his offspring combined, probably deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for calming things down.
Third, Pakistan is the lawless nation here. Their previous female prime minister was forced out partly because of video tape taken by her secret service detail of her having sex with her own husband. (This is too absurd for me to make up, mind you.) Pakistan is currently controlled by a military dictatorship, which puts it into the same category as Pinochet, Hussein, Castro....
Fourth, a "poor" country deciding to spend a LOT of money on a private Internet backbone should scare the begeezus out of people. India is as more proximal to large population pockets than any other country. If you wanted to network Asia, Africa, and Europe, India is the place to do it.
Fifth, India was/is on the U.S. watch list because of grain sales back in the 1970's between Russia and India, and because of the U.S.'s need for a place to launch CIA spy plane flights (see Gary Powers reference above). The old "friend of my enemy is my enemy" simplistic notions of how the relationships between nations should work. India needed food, Russia was willing to sell it cheaper than the U.S., and so the simple rules of capitalism landed India on the watch list.
Sixth, there is great education in India. Who here among us has not had an Indian classmate? For seeing so many of them, remember that you are only seeing the ones that got accepted over here, and/or had the money to come over. There are many brains in India, well-educated, disciplined, and hungry for the opportunity to prove they are good, and to improve their lot in life. They lack only the chance, the opportunity....
From what I understand this will be a large project to interconnect India's largest technical colleges (Institutes of Technology, which are very prestegious and good) and have smallish (by US standards) supercomputers at each one. They would then resell the pooled computing resources as needed.
The American equivalent would be having a supercomputer at Stanford, MIT, UMich, CMU, GATech, and maybe 4 other places, connected via internet2 and ssh tunnels.
Umm, should the indians worry about feeding their own and eliminating bubonic plague as a major cause of death before they build stuff like this?
God do I hope that's a silly European and not a stupid American saying something like that. (It's probably a stupid American aspiring to be a silly European, in all likelyhood).
Actually, I think this is an exceptional move to help get people out of poverty (not that all people in India are in poverty - another rather myopic view). Besides the usual opportunities represented in such a move, technology tends to bring in a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurship (read: a way for poor blokes to move up in the world).
Because of the rate of change with technology, rapid obsolescence, intellectual demands (brain vs brawn), the expansion of technology in any economy really helps young adults create new businesses which in turn feed more money into channels outside of the status quo.
I hope India explores liberal licensing of 2.4 and 5.8 GHz frequencies as well, ensuring this backbone has room to grow. India's telecom network has been terribly restricted, corrupt and ineffective in past years and a wireless broadband framework could serve as an excellent spur network to feed all this new commerce into the backbone.
eliminating bubonic plague
Er... we still have it in the US, buddy! It lives in prairie dogs (which have become recent animal preservationist favorites because they're so cute). Folks still come down with it from other rodent population that comes in contact with the prairie dogs (which are unaffected by the disease).
*scoove*
About supercomputing in India. CDAC had developed it's first supercomputer long back and has been making a lot of progress in this field. And before raising a nuclear alarm, India already has nuclear capability (and can launch a satellite into orbit (2+2 = ?) ) besides there are many other civilian applications on parallel computing .. ever heard of weather prediction (farming and fishing happen to be the largest industry in India and weather prediction is critical for these industries) Now i am not going to make a big list of all the applications of parallel computing but developing nuclear weapon is just one among the vast number of critical applications. Hell even the cows in india need the supercomputing power (they're the ones plowing the farms ;-)
Here is an article on the same subject in the Times of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp ?art_id=2867426
Do so many people really believe that if a country isn't spending all their money on development, they might as well not be spending any?
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Ah, the crypto-colonialist has crept out from under his rock.
1) India produces quite enough food for its population. It's poverty that's killing people.
2) Bubonic plague thrives in India because of the close proximity of people and animals over much of the country. Would you like them to start exterminating their biota to make you happy?If you are talking about antibiotics, then India needs a lot of cash it really doesn't have right now because they're still an economic backwater.
3) Since poverty is the greatest risk factor for death in India, maybe some industrial advancement would be in order. Not the kind that produces pollution and low wages, but maybe tertiary and quartenary industries, like say, computing science and engineering. Oops! They've been doing that and enjoying good economic growth and increased tax revenues to pay for things.
THUS to better serve the needs of their people through economic growth and transitioning away from a physical labor economy (where education isn't required), they need this kind of project. So please keep your neo-colonialist views to yourself. Do you imagine everyone outside of Europe and America as poor, stupid, starving darkies who need good white folk like you to put their priorities straight?
PUH-leeze! The White Man's Burden is SO over.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Ahhh. Perhaps they are adapting the Avian Carrier technology to Large Ruminants to provide lower altitude, higher throughput (camels can carry more than birds) service. Latency is still pretty bad, I'll bet.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
" First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world."
Kinda ironic india invented the term 'third world' and applied it to themselves - the idea was the world was polarizing into the russian / american camps, & India saw that small, poor nations that cozied up to one or the other didn't do all that well, so decided to go down the route of 'independent neutrality'. Supposedly the rationale for this was all sorts of world-peace type reasons, but the (presumably hoped for & planned) outcome was the US and USSR outdid each other to see who could throw the most money & toys at the Indian Govt. Dig out an old copy of Janes from the 80s or earlier & have a look at which countries produced major chunks of hardware in the Indian military - a weirder mix of USA/USSR you won't find almost anywhere.
Can't think of too many other countries that did as well out of joining the 'third world' camp though, and it quickly became a catch-all term for places mostly thought of by westerners as stupefyingly poor.