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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."
Since a lot of people are asking about the sanctions on India, here is some info froma superc omp/
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indi
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India is included in the Tier 3 of the U.S. HPC Export Control Policy of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC). Although the U.S. government relaxed in March this year the upper performance limit of computers that could be exported to India from 85,000 MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second) to 190,000 MTOPS, imports of supercomputers comparable to the new 1 TFLOP computer designed by C-DAC are still restricted, according to Arora. "The performance of the PARAM Padma in terms of MTOPS is in the vicinity of 500,000 MTOPS," Arora added.
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I think this is just a way to restrict the flow of technologyc omp/
According to this article http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indiasuper
None of the PARAM series computers have been used in any defence establishment. I quote --
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None of the PARAM supercomputers installed in India so far are used in defense organizations, according to Arora. "We have maintained throughout that our research is for civilian applications, and not for defense and nuclear applications," said Arora. "Some defense organizations in India have their own supercomputer projects. (My note: i.e. projects separate from the PARAM ones)We see the PARAM project as helping build our self-reliance, and also to help establish India's hardware design capability."
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Have you read that article on Yahoo? There's nothing about US arms export to Iraq. And US never did export weapons to Taliban.
You made it up, didn't you?
The technology export restrictions are to prevent creation of mass destruction weapons.
I wonder, have such sanctions really peaceful reasons or they are just a political instrument to protect economical interests of US weapon corporations?
No no no, export is in interests of corporations, not restrictions of it. Or you think US does not sell high technology to India just to sell nuclear weapons to it? Do you ?
"The AIX version supports 62 nodes with four processors each, while the Linux version supports only eight nodes, as Linux is not able to scale over more nodes" - that's from here
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1437/021217indiasuperc omp
The Dragon chips you're referring to are equivalent to a 200-260Mhz Pentium......you're also missing the point that x86 doesn't do multiple processing well....and the Dragon's don't do multi-processing at all. Nor do they have a significant addressable memory space.
So, they'd make lousy compute nodes for a supercomputer!!!! Heck, it'd be doubtful they even had the I/O bandwidth for the required high speed networking connections of a compute node.
Nice try, though.
-psy
"I Wonder if some of the Indian exports assisted in DPRK weapons systems development?"
;) Sometimes the American ignorance about India appalls me.
This is such a naive statement that shows you really know very little about India! First of all India is a responsible sensible democratic nation that unlike much of the sillyness of the cold war never aligned itself with either side and was a leader of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) (Which was an organization that thumbed its nose at NATO and Warsaw pact). India has a history of never sharing sensitive technology with rogue nations. India has been doing space/nuclear/computer technology for a long time now (many decades) never mind that most common westerners are getting to hear about it now only (e.g. Did you know we first exploded a nuclear bomb in 1974?) On top of all this DPRK is an ally of Pakistan having supplied the Paki's rockets in return for Nuclear bomb tech. The Paki's can't make a thing on their own. They stole most of nuclear tech from Europe on the sly and got all their missile tech from DPRK. India would never even have decent relations with countries so much in bed with undemocratic islamic radicalists and terrorist infested Pakistan. Please read a bit more of a background research about India and South Asia before wondering such silly things. Is that too much to expect from a Pullitzer Prize winning professor?
I would say there is a greater chance of the Pakistan nuking India. Their military dictator/president describes Pakistan as "The citadel of Islam".
Doesn't matter who starts the contest, a lot of people will be fucked...
These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable.
:-)
Sure, but that was also true in Seymore Cray's day. Admittedly his machines provided substantially better scalar performance than normal mainframes did at the time, but their rated "supercomputer" performance was only obtainable by operating on multiple datasets simultaneously using vector operations. If your problem wasn't parallelizable, your investment was largely wasted. Fortunately, there is no lack of real-world problems that are inherently parallel.
It's worth noting also that conventional single-machine performance is inherently limited by a number of very strong physical constraints, primarily the speed of light and device leakage currents as transistor geometries become ever smaller. This really leaves us nowhere to go for pure sequential computation speedup. Quantum computers will probably live in a single box to reduce decoherence, but even they require problem breakdown into parallel solutions.
Hence the move away from scalar performance and towards multiprocessor, cluster, and distributed computing. With SETI@home delivering around 15 Teraflops on their specific problem at the distributed end of the spectrum, and with the PARAM Padma's IBM Power4 providing 2 processors per chip and 8 processors per module directly out of the IBM fabs even before assembly of multiprocessors and clusters commences, clearly computation is heading towards a future of high parallelism. And about time.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Islamic fundamentalism is one good reason. Other then that, we have history: It is Pakistan that has always attacked India. Three times, methinks, although I'll let other supply the years.
There current "ruler" himself attacked even when their PM was holding peace talks.
Pakistan is a military/Islamic dictatorship, one religion; India a democracy, cultural meltpot.
Successive Pakistani regimes have shown they have no qualms about speaking lies and twisting the truth as long as it serves the purpose of fueling the hate against India. The Art of War: In an extremist enviornment, the more extreme or radical your position, the more powerful you become. Same happened in the Talibanesque Islam. Many other examples too.
Pakistan is a nation which, IMHO, has it's identity derived from one fact alone : enemy of India. They have hardly any progress to cheer about, even when you compare to India, and that is saying something.
Large parts of Pakistan's NWFP are actually not exactly under administrative control of the government. Fundamentalism/tribals rule.
Pakistan is the haven for criminal activities. Daewood Ebrahim, belived to be one of the richest persons in the world, operates from Pakistan, through ISI support. Islamic terrorists, in NWFP, who hijacked Indian Airline aircraft were recently discharged from house arrest!
Pakistan's armed forces can't be trusted. Their generals keep popping off democratically elected governments. They also eliminate their own Generals. Figures. Large section of Army commanders and ISI are sympathetic to the "Islamic cause". Imagine, in such a situation, what a commander with nuke trigger might do. He'll launch the "Islamic bomb" against India to ensure martyrdom for himself and his "religion".
And fuck up millions of people. That's why Pakistan is more likely to "lose it" than India.
If the USA hasn't attacked Pakistan like Afghanistan, it is because of some reasons:
1. We need(ed) a base to carry out operation in Afghanistan against Taliban & Co.
2. Fear of Nuclear holocaust.
3. The fact that Pakistan is the centre of Islamic terrorism. Smartly enough, the Bush administration is actually using the military dictator/self appointed president to track down and destroy Al-Qaeda network.
Or that, atleast, is the public line.
Certainly, we have managed to nab a few top Al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. Reports keep coming how Osama is only a grasp away. In Feburary, he was almost nabbed; ran away just an hour before a joint raid by US intelligence and ISI. Go figure.
Of course, we are not pressuring Pakistan to dismantle the Islamic terrorist organizations that operate in India. Not unless this business of Al-Qaeda is done with. There are disturbing reports that Al-Qaeda is regrouping in Karachi (the crime capital of the World) and planning to "utilize" the emotions once US attacks Iraq to launch more attacks against US/India/Israeli targets. Let's see.
The claims of on invasion was unfounded. They have NEVER found any artifacts from an invasion. The story was invented by those who it benefited.