HEADLINES
JOBS
COM:PORT
POLICY POLICE
ARCHIVES

C-DAC's supercomputers are a big draw

One of the most popular stalls at the Comdex India exhibition this year was that of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India's supercomputing pioneer.

It attracted large numbers of visitors despite the fact that Param 10000, its latest supercomputer was not live. Only information about the system was available.

"People are really proud of the 100 Giga FLOPS Param 10000 parallel supercomputer as an independent design and production from India," said Sundararajan of the applications group at C-DAC.

"We have targeted scientific and engineering people and many from these categories have visited us. Many of them want to use the Param," he claimed.

Sundararajan explained "It is a kind of illusion that building such a machine is a big challenge. But it is more the applications software for extracting the maximum performance that is crucial. We talk to people about how PARAM can be used for major applications such as weather forecasting, seismic data processing, remote serving etc."

Sundararajan is sure that there have been several benefits from exhibiting their machines at Comdex. In his view, interaction with so many scientific personnel here has helped generate new ideas. A scientist in the domain of molecular modelling, he himself is now persuaded to address more closely the issue of how people can use the technologies that he is working on.

"When people ask, 'Can you do this with this technology?' it really offers a new focus," says Sundararajan.

The high-profile participation of C-DAC at the Comdex is somewhat a surprise, considering that many leading private sector IT companies are missing here. C-DAC, after all, is just a scientific society of the government's Department of Electronics.

"This (our participation) is a result of the emerging openers and competition in our society. Being in the higher end of applications, we want the country to know about us," explained Dr A K Chakravarti, adviser to DoE. "We have collaborative programmes with Russia and Singapore and we are looking at other markets. Our presence at such exhibition is bound to help."

Tell us what you think