HPC: A Priority Area
C-DAC was set-up in 1988 with the explicit purpose of demonstrating India's HPC capability after the US government denied the import of technology for weather forecasting purposes. Since then, C-DAC's developments have mirrored the progress of HPC computing worldwide.
During the second mission, C-DAC advented the Open Frame Architecture for cluster computing culminating in the PARAM 10000 in 1998 and the 1TF PARAM Padma in 2002.
Along with 60 installations worldwide, C-DAC, now has two HPC facilities of its own, The 100 GF (GigaFlop) PARAM 10000 at the National Param Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) at Pune and the 1 TF (TeraFlop) PARAM Padma at the C-DAC's Terascale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF) at Bangalore. The indigenously built PARAM Padma debuted on the Top500 list of supercomputers at 171 in May 2003.
After the completion of PARAM Padma (1 TF peak computing power, subsequently upgraded by another 1TF peak) in December 2002 and it's dedication to the nation in June 2003, it was used extensively as a third party facility (CTSF) by a wide spectrum of users from academia, research labs and end-user agencies. In addition, C-DAC has been actively working since then to build its Next Generation HPC system (Param NG) and associated technology components. C-DAC commissioned the System called PARAM "Yuva" in November 2008. This system with Rmax (Sustained Performance) of 37.80 TFs and Rpeak (Peak Performance) of 54.01 TFs, has been ranked at One Hundred Nine (109th) in TOP500 Systems enlisted, as per the analysis released in June 2009. The system is an intermediate milestone of C-DAC's HPC Roadmap towards Petaflop Computing by 2012.
C-DAC has made significant contributions to the Indian HPC arena in terms of awareness (by means of training programmes), consultancy, skilled manpower and technology development as well as through deployment of systems and solutions for use by the scientific, engineering and business community.
C-DAC's Capabilities and Expertise in HPC
C-DAC is an incubator for several HPC enabling technologies. C-DAC's HPC solutions are built encompassing the following areas of expertise either individually or in combination:
- Application Development - Algorithm and solution development in several application areas, including Weather Forecasting, Seismic Data Processing & Oil Exploration, Financial Modeling, Bioinformatics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Structural Mechanics and Materials Modeling.
- System Software and Tools - These include Light-Weight Protocols, Program Development Environments (PDE), Compilers, Clustering Software, System Management Tools, Math Libraries and Parallel File Systems.
- Hardware Systems – These include building MPP machines, building large clusters, System Area Networks (SAN), PARAMNet-II, PARAMNet-3 and Reconfigurable Computing Systems (RCS).
- Education and Training
C-DAC has also been generating revenue (though in small amount) by offering consultancy services and by imparting training and education programmes in HPC and associated areas. C-DAC's VLSI Design and Embedded System courses are examples of programmes offered by C-DAC due to its expertise in HPC area.
With the above capabilities, C-DAC continues to develop and deliver critical solutions to address a wide spectrum of the nation's current and future HPC needs.
Grid Computing
GARUDA is a collaboration of science researchers and experimenters on a nation wide grid of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments that aims to provide the technological advances required to enable data and compute intensive science for the 21st century. One of GARUDA's most important challenges is to strike the right balance between research and the daunting task of deploying that innovation into some of the most complex scientific and engineering endeavors being undertaken today.
The Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India has funded the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to deploy the nation-wide computational grid GARUDA. In Proof of Concept (PoC) phase which ended on March 2008, 17 cities across the country were connected with an aim to bring "Grid" networked computing to research labs and industry. From April 2008 the Foundation phase is in progress with an aim to include more users' applications, providing Service Oriented architecture, improving network stability and upgrading grid resources. GARUDA will assist to accelerate India's drive to turn its substantial research investment into tangible economic benefits.
PoC Phase has demonstrated how a production quality Grid infrastructure will benefit the scientific and engineering community. The implementation of the PoC phase of the GARUDA project has placed a landmark in the country's technology roadmap with the following achievements:
• High speed cyber infrastructure network across the country
• Resources aggregation from several locations
• Building core technical competence in grid computing - middleware, tools and services.
• Prototyped applications - Disaster Management and Bioinformatics.
• Building Virtual Communities for Large Scale Collaborations
In the foundation phase more applications and new technology and architecture such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in grid computing will be tested and validated.
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