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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."
So those fiendish Indians won't be able to simulate nuclear warhead tests, that's why. If they could do that, they could BUILD a working one...errr....no, wait...If they can't simulate, the only way to test improvements in warhead yield is by detonating a warhead for real, and that's better because....hmmmm...
Ya got me. Why don't we want India to have a supercomputer?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It's amazing what pressure can do for you. Until a few years, we were denied technology for building supercomputers by the west. This forced CDAC to work on such technology from scratch.
Likewise for most of India's rocket programme (albeit with the occasional help from Russia) and other technology. When pushed to the limits, you outperform yourself.
I'm sorry, but I have to insist that you can't add a bunch of PC's together, and end up with the equivalent of a general purpose supercomputer.
These so-called "supercomputers" only have the performance of a supercomputer on the class of problems which are inherently parallelizable. For problems which require serialization, by needing results in hand to go onto the next step in the calculation, these things slow down to the speed of one of the component PC's.
I guess now that Seymore Cray has died, no one else can build real supercomputers. 8-(.
-- Terry
And India IS nuclear and has a fairly stable government. The U.S. or U.N. will be hard pressed to tell them "bad". Plus I really wouldn't mind their nuclear program going digital, a little less radiation in the morning breeze. They're going to do nuke research no matter what, might as well encourage them to not blow shit up in the process.
To top it off, why is it exactly we, as THE U.S. feel we can be top dawg and keep everyone else down. India, like the U.S., has quite a bit of poverty and it really wouldn't hurt to encourage them to look towards bettering themselves and their people. (nuclear research can actually be used for things other than building bombs ...)
In the tech world there are no borders, and this really pisses the old schoolers off. We're not going to do anything except identify they broke a sanction trust me we've picked enough fights to last us a while ... plus just think about the benchmarks they'll get on that baby ... it will just kick the shit outta everyone else at the U.N. LAN parties ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Oh, really. And at the same time US exports lots of weapons to all over the world, including Iraq and Taliban.
I wonder, have such sanctions really peaceful reasons or they are just a political instrument to protect economical interests of US weapon corporations?
Less is more !
Did you even read those links?
There's a world of difference between a bunch of radioactive waste (the boy scout) or a nuclear reactor (the scavanger hunt) and a real honest-to-goodness nuclear weapon. Things like shock waves, timing circuits, controlled detonation, etc. that actually produce fission and not just a scattering of radioactive shrapnel.
And this is beside the point of TESTING the weapons, which tends to draw attention from the superpowers-that-be... and has a likely chance of harming your own impoverished country.
If you want to have a nuclear weapon that you know works, and that no one else knows you have or are working on, you NEED a supercomputer. Anything less gets you dirty bombs or UN sanctions.
(If nukes were really as easy as you think they are, wouldn't some have been used in the middle east's religious war by now?)
Seems to have been in the news lately. From Bill Gates to hand held computers - it seems to have seen a lot lately. A short summary -
(1) Bill Gates and India
The AIDS donations, and yah, maybe source code sharing and Windows for a bargain.
(2) The Simputer A handheld pc that runs on Linux and is available for a bargain.
(3) Reliance and CDMA
Reliance has launched a WLL based mobile phone system which promises high bandwidth, JAVA enabled advanced telephony. AT pathetically low prices !!!!
(4) The Param Padma
A 16 teraflop supercomputer, faster than many others available.
Coming to think of it, a developing nation seems to have more to look forward to than a developed nation!! That also reminds me that the brain behind many Intel chips is Indian. India lacks infrastructure/proper governance/organization. But it looks like Nostradamus's prophecy of India becoming a superpower may come true... within the next few years.
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
This perfectly illustrates how bad things have gotten technology wise in the U.S. People stick their heads in the sand and say over and over like a mantra: "The U.S. leads the world in technology". Well, bucko, it hasn't been so for quite a while!....AND let me clue you into something: Unless the education system and the corporate structures change here in the U.S. of A, it's gonna get worse. Much worse. Right now, Americans have one of the worst education systems in the world. Even Canada, who we like to put down as being scrawny, kicks our ass in terms of the numbers of literate people coming out of schools today. The same is true in most European countries and Japan, and yes even in places like India. Add to this the corporate attitude here that the next quarter's 'guidance' is all the matters, and you have the recipe for failure. And failure is what's happening. Look at the examples. The U.S. developed the Internet, yet who has more computers per capita and a better infrascructure? South Korea. What country has had computers and the net in all their schools for years? Canada. Yet here we pat each other on the back because we might have half the schools wired by 2005. We're pathetic. Another big problem here is the politics here. We truly believe that we're the world's Police Department, so we spend large fortunes on military hardware instead of food and health care and education for our kids. All the Patriot missles and bombs in the world won't help us in the future. Our future is our children and we'd better well start worrying about feeding, clothing, keeping them healthy and educating them well then making more bombs.
US is a well-known international victim of import-tariff(look at how bad the deals with Japans), therefore US govt dare not interfere international trades like that.
Bollocks. Tell it to George W. Bush and the steel industry, would you? They'll go to bat against other countries for trying to protect the banana exports of our old colonies, while at the same time, imposing tariffs on steel imports.
Not that such hypocracy is anything new, or even a surprise, but I hate when people buy into the myth that the US stands for free trade. It's absolute bollocks.
Still no evidence of weapons export to Iraq.
The US exported chemical and biological agents, machine tools and ammo to Iraq in the mid- to late-1980s. See, for example here, here, and here. The third link is especially relevant to this topic because it claims that supercomputers were given to Iraq.
Incidentally, this is all in the public record in the States. You shouldn't even need to FOIA for the information.
Most technology really only requires a bit of drive and a few smart people to develop. Hell, that's where it came from in the first place.
Most of America's restrictions on exporting tech overtly rely on the concept that America is just better and smarter than anyone else.
Bull puckies.
If America wants to maintain any sort of commercial lead in technology it has to distribute it in such a way that it's just plain easier and cheaper to *buy* it than develop it yourself.
As Goethe noted, everything has been thought of, the trick is to think of it again. The historical evidence is clear that anything America can think of so can China, Russia, England, Germany, etc.
Oh. Wait, as often as not these countries think of things *first* and America has to play catch-up.
The idea that you can 'restrict' technology is just plain doofey. If you can figure something out so can hundreds of thousands of others.
So go for it India. Think of stuff, build stuff, develop 'home grown' free software, put the screws to American 'tech' companies and make its government sweat bullets.
Maybe it'll get the country off its ass again, like Russia did when it launched a satellite years before anyone thought it would be possible.
Anything but this damned brand name pushing, marketroid driven 'economy' we've got now.
KFG
Yawn yawn. Yeah, fair competition always seems to be "stealing" when it's brown people doing it.Sure, that's a better solution than learning how to do better work! Let's subsidize overpaid incompetence! It worked for the air traffic controllers, right?I don't know anyone who lost their job because of NAFTA. I know dozens of people who lost their jobs in the Bush Economic Miracle, though.How dare those students perform valuable work when they should be drinking and sleeping around! I bet some of them are brown foreigners too. Who is we kemosabe?
Those who are willing to work, and have some skill, don't need the Federal Bureau of Foreigner Oppression to protect their jobs. All they need is an economy that's not totally hosed.
You comment that "India is a secular constitutional democracy." However as we speak the BJP is re-writing history to satisfy Hindu fundamentalists. The latest public school history books neglect certain dates that are of religious controversy (say 1500 BC), no longer mention the influence of the Aryan invasions on Hindu culture, etc.
Of course the same thing is going on here in the U.S., where research indicating that there is no link between abortion and cancer has been pulled down from HHS web pages as well as research indicating that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs.
Shall we just declare war on fundamentalism and get it over with?
Happy New Year,
Scott
To be ontopic, CDAC, despite being a govt organisation has a great marketing wing & it's Indian language s/w is still on the top. And the clever thing is it is being merged with another organisation NCST, which is more into opensource stuff, while CDAC retains it's commercial ways of doing things. But that's how things should work, in this market economy, post protection days.