India's Bargain Supercomputer

MaximusTheGreat writes "India beat U.S. supercomputer sanctions by building a teraflop $5 million PARAM Padma supercomputer, which is half the price of similar computers being sold in the international market. It can be scaled upto 16 teraflops, on a build-to-order basis For comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the U.S. is about 10 Teraflops. Some techical details and more info on CDAC , ITworld, Economic times and Asia Times. Also, India has been exporting older model PARAM 10000s to other countries like Russia, Canada, Germany etc. for some time, and expects to increase exports significantly with the new model PARAM Padma."

Comments

Re:Technology in India is a joke

[blissfully yours]

The Simputer is a failure. The Dell Axim is cheaper and more important is actually being made and bought and used. The Indians have NO supercomputer listed in the top 500. Japan, China, U.S. and Europe do. Indians make NOTHING at all that is world class. Even in software their contribution is limited to slaving for foreigners. Heck they are even dpendent on tiny nations like South Africa, Israel, Sweden for such crucial defensive necessities as artillery shells! Any way you look at it, India is a failed state. Its ridiculous to see all these silly, deluded indians here boasting endlessly about india's 'achievements' when the ground reality is so pathetically primitive.

Oh, that's just great

[I Am The Owl]

As if we needed one more nuclear power improving their weapons of mass destruction. Yes, the fact that India has their own supercomputer industry will surely put me at ease when they would very likely use their weapons against Pakistan at the drop of a hat.

Nuclear detonations on anything approaching a large scale will have global environmental consequences. I'm not going to kid myself that the Indian government is going to use this on anything so innocuous as cancer research. It's going to be either decryption, bio or chemical weapons research, or nuclear detonation simulation.

what a joke

[spiffy_guy]

Oh yeah India is leading the way in supercomputing (laugh laugh). They took some p630s or something similar from the p series

Then they hooked them together with a "native" switch. The details on the switch start to get fuzzy, for all we know it is a Cisco 1000/T Ethernet switch. Then they build an MPI stack (probably a port of an open source one from an American University). So you now have an expensive slower version of what IBM would be happy to sell you for half the price if you lived in America. Yet it is still half the price of what you can get in an export restricted country. So we hold them to paying 2 - 4 times as much for a much less capable machine, that's ok with me. They built it by cobbling together scraps from American technology. It sounds like the supercomputer export restrictions are having some effect.

As far as the US leading technology I just have to say damn straight. Any Indian programmer worth his salt is living in the US, working for a US company. Same goes for most other countries. Plus, the world sends its brightest here for our great University education. Once we have them living in the US do you think they want to return to their home country for poor wages and oppresive governments? Think again.