INDUSTRY

By Steve Fisher, Editor in Chief -- Earlier this month, India’s C-DAC (Centre for Advanced Computing) announced plans to build a nationwide grid of supercomputers that will be used for a variety of research applications. The centre, based in Pune, plans to link the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science, seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and a number of other academic institutions. Supercomputing Online interviewed C-DAC’s director R.K. Arora to learn more. SCO: Please provide some details on India's proposed nationwide grid of supercomputers. In particular, the types of machines, manufacturers, architectures, interconnects, memory, locations of systems etc. ARORA: The proposed nationwide Grid of supercomputers is an IGrid: An Information Infrastructure based on next generation High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) technology. The IGrid providing Grid computing facilities is a logical extension to the work in the area of HPCC (Supercomputers) that C-DAC has been engaged in for over a decade. This is the trend seen internationally, and is an effective method of providing seamless access of the supercomputing facility to a large number of researchers and other users country wide rather than having to own them individually. As the areas of research interests in the academic and scientific community and the Industry have increased which require access to supercomputing facilities, a Grid infrastructure provides an effective answer as a utility. The proposal is to integrate in the first instance C-DAC’s own supercomputing facilities at its centres at Pune and Bangalore and a few other academic institutions and national laboratories in the next phase into the Grid. The Grid will primarily be powered by C-DAC’s own PARAM series of supercomputers. PARAM supercomputers are primarily cluster computing machines which use commodity high end computing nodes, and deploy C-DAC’s own PARAM net interconnect Switch and HPCC system software components and tools developed by it. The total computing power that is proposed over this Grid over the next 3-5 years would be several Teraflops with terabytes of storage etc. SCO: What areas of research will benefit the most from the new grid? ARORA: The areas of research interest in the Grid are primarily the applications, both compute and data intensive, for a number of researchers and other users. The example applications are; Bio-informatics, weather modeling, seismic data processing and other large databases in Government and Corporates for decision support. SCO: What bureaucratic challenges are you facing in getting the grid up and running? Is there a particular timeframe you're looking at? ARORA: The Government is highly supportive of this initiative and have in fact even nurtured the development in such high technology areas to enable build self-efficiency in this area to address the strategic and economic needs. The challenge indeed would be in developing and setting up the Grid over different locations identified in phases. C-DAC feels confident of taking up this challenge with its past success in developing and commissioning HPCC systems at several locations. SCO: In addition to C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) what other entities will be contributing to this effort? ARORA: It is proposed as a national effort. In addition to C-DAC, the project will involve premier academic institutions and certain key users in developing specific applications of their interest who would also subsequently be the beneficiary of the project. It is also expected that a number of other users in research and industry would find this infrastructure useful to them for addressing their evolving needs of modeling and simulation and data storage and archive. SCO: Would you provide a bit of background on C-DAC and also the PARAM series of supercomputers? What are your expectations for the next generation of PARAM machines? ARORA: C-DAC is a national initiative of the Government of India set up to build capabilities in the areas of HPCC to help address its strategic and economic sectors. It has built PARAM series of supercomputers of three different generations and supplied systems in India and a few overseas. C-DAC is presently working on next generation hardware and software for HPCC applications. C-DAC has also made pioneering efforts in the area of Multilingual computing that have enabled a number of products and technologies developed by it and used by over a million of people to help them work on computers in their own languages. Using these skills and technologies developed, C-DAC has also been offering solutions to address the requirements in sectors of Power, Telecom, Healthcare, Financial services, Education, e-Governance etc,. dealing with diverse technologies such as Parallel Processing, Artificial intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Data Warehousing/mining, Geomatics, Bio-informatics, Real Time Systems etc. C-DAC is also a provider of high end education and training through specialized courses in the areas of Advanced computing, VLSI design, Embedded system design, Enterprise system management, Digital multimedia etc.