The Hindu Business Line : TIFR announces tie-up with HP

PARAM 10000, the supercomputer from the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, had given a jolt to the computer industry when it flouted the US restrictions and went ahead with the making of the supercomputer.

Now, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) has announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard to implement the High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions at its Computational Mathematics Laboratory (CML) in Pune.

Mr Pallab Talukdar, Director, Enterprise Marketing and Alliances, HP India Sales Pvt Ltd, told mediapersons the project would feature one of the largest supercomputers in India and would include the roll out of the largest Itanium Linux cluster. The implementation would enhance CML's ability to conduct world-class research in the area of computer science and mathematics and would also allow it to run various complex algorithms with up to a billion variables.

The super computer includes 78x2-way Itanium nodes with a high performance infini-band backbone. With this, India enters into the top 500 having this facility, while China was already present in the top five, Mr Pallab noted. Commenting on the first computer, the Param 10000, Dr Narendra Karmarkar, Head (CML), TIFR, said the Param was a 32-bit processor and operating system while the TIFR would have a 64-bit processor and operationg system. The switch over from 32-bit to 64-bit has been happening in the US for some time while noting that this was the first in India.

He said the 64-bit would also allow for bisectional bandwidth which would allow the engineers to solve more complexa logarithms as this required higher bandwidth.

Dr Narendra also pointed out that India needed to invest much more in the HPC area while noting that the country could boast of the correct hardware, software engineers, mathematical brains which would be teamed up with the expertise brought in from HP. In dollar terms, he added that China was spending six times more than India in the HPC area.

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