BANGALORE - At
US$5 million, India's soon-to-be launched one teraflop
PARAM-Padma supercomputer is half the international
price and has a huge potential for exports to the global
market, top government officials said on Monday.
"We are looking at both [domestic and overseas
markets]. We do know that there are countries who need
supercomputing power. We will be in a position to offer
them solutions," said Rajeeva Ratna Shah, secretary,
department of IT, Union Ministry of Communications and
Information Technology.
R K Arora, executive
director of the Center for Development of Advanced
Computing (CDAC), which developed the supercomputer,
said PARAM-Padma was priced at $5 million for the
overseas market which, he added, was half the
international price.
Shah, who inaugurated "High
Performance Computing (HPC) Asia 2002" in Banglaore on
Monday night, said that 52 Param series machines were in
use now - 45 in India, four in Russia and one each in
Germany, Canada and Singapore.
Officials said
it's highly likely that Russia would place orders for
PARAM-Padma. "They have all the other [Param] machines.
I don't see any reason why they won't [place an order].
They are quite loyal to Param. We definitely hope they
do that," Shah said.
Param-Padma is C-DAC's next
generation high performance scalable computing cluster,
currently with a peak computing power of one Teraflop.
Shah said that Param-Pamda can be scaled up to 16
teraflops. He added that Param-Padma would be launched
in the next one month.
