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March
2002 -
Volume 1, Issue 2
India
Goes I-Grid
Once stymied
by US sanctions but now aided by the fast communications links,
India's state-run agency for advanced computing plans to build a
nationwide grid of supercomputers for mammoth applications.
According to
the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, (C-DAC), there
had increasingly been a need for people to access high performance
computing rather than own it. The aim of the Centre has been to
make India shortly an I-Grid (Information Grid) country.
Founded in 1988,
C-DAC has built four versions of its Param series of machines to
place India among the supercomputing nations like the US, Japan,
Israel and China in spite of technology export restrictions by the
US on the grounds that India would put the technology to military
use.
The latest Param
crunches numbers at a speed of 100 gigaflops, or 100 billion floating
point operators per second. That put it among the world's high performers.
C-DAC's computers,
built on a sophisticated clustering of microprocessors, resemble
the popular Napster peer-to-peer file- sharing system. The grid
could also power bioinformatics to decipher voluminous data that
has come with the mapping of the humane genome.
The Centre has
600 strong staff of which 250 are involved in supercomputing and
the aim is to continue research and development through a successful
economic model. Besides using its supercomputers for commercial
purposes, C-DAC earns revenue from selling Indian regional language
software and by training high-tech engineers.
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