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

All supercomputers are parallel machines

[Morgaine]

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. :-)

Re:ummm ... lets look at this from a political are

[slashuzer]

Pakistan would be more likely to shoot their nukes first, because.....? they're more Islamic? Is that the best you can come up with? Give me a break.

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.