PARAM

PARAM is a series of supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM SHIVAY. PARAM is a series of supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM SHIVAY. Parama means supreme in Sanskrit Language. In Hindi, it is Param. After being denied Cray supercomputers, India has started a program to develop indigenous supercomputers and supercomputing technologies. These supercomputers were also capable of assisting in the development of Nuclear Weapons. For the purpose of achieving self-sufficiency in the field, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was set up in 1988 by the then Department of Electronics with Dr. Vijay Bhatkar as its Director. The project was given an initial run of 3 years and an initial funding of ₹ 300,000,000, the same amount of money and time that was usually expended to purchase a supercomputer from the US. In 1990, a prototype was produced and was benchmarked at the 1990 Zurich Supercomputering Show. It surpassed most other systems, placing India second after US. The final result of the effort was the PARAM 8000, which was installed in 1991. Unveiled in 1991, PARAM 8000 used Inmos T800 transputers. It was architectted by Vijay Bhatkar and was a fairly new and innovative microprocessor architecture designed for parallel processing at the time. It was a distributed memory MIMD architecture with a reconfigurable interconnection network. It had 64 CPUs. Exported to Germany, UK and Russia. PARAM 8600 was an improvement over PARAM 8000. It was a 256 CPU computer. For every four Inmos T800, it employed an Intel i860 coprocessor. The result was over 5 GFLOPS at peak for vector processing. Several of these models were exported. PARAM 9900/SS was designed to be a MPP system. It used the SuperSPARC II processor. The design was changed to be modular so that newer processors could be easily accommodated. Typically, it used 32-40 processors. But, it could be scaled up to 200 CPUs using the clos network topology.PARAM 9900/US was the UltraSPARC variant and PARAM 9900/AA was the DEC Alpha variant. In 1998, the PARAM 10000 was unveiled. PARAM 10000 used several independent nodes, each based on the Sun Enterprise 250 server and each such server contained two 400Mhz UltraSPARC II processors. The base configuration had three compute nodes and a server node. The peak speed of this base system was 6.4 GFLOPS. A typical system would contain 160 CPUs and be capable of 100 GFLOPS But, it was easily scalable to the TFLOP range. Exported to Russia and Singapore.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). PARAM Yuva (Yuva means Youth in Sanskrit) was unveiled in November 2008. It is the latest machine in the series of PARAM. It has a maximum sustainable speed (Rmax) of 38.1 TFLOPS and a peak speed (Rpeak) of 54 TFLOPS. There are 4608 cores in it, based on Intel 73XX of 2.9 GHz each. It has a storage capacity of 25 TB up to 200 TB. It uses PARAMNet-3 as its primary interconnect.