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 Brahma.

Parama means supreme in Sanskrit Language. In Hindi, it is Param.

History

India's Supercomputer programme was started in late 1980s, precisely during the 3rd quarter of 1987, in New Delhi for software, in Bangalore for hardware, and in Pune for firmware, while Sam Pitroda, advisor to C-DOT, and C-DOT's Indigenous Architecture and Design Team constituted by its Senior Member Technical Staff / Senior Programme Managers including Mohan Subramaniyam alias Mohan Rose Ali, Periasamy Muthiah, and Leslie D'Souza had all worked hard at the Centre for Development of Telematics – C-DOT, after successfully completing their 3 years mission on designing the Nation's first ever indigenous C-DOT Digital Switching System – DSS (Digital Telephone Exchanges), to create C-DOT's Indigenous Super-computing Machine called CHIPPS – C-DOT High-Performance Parallel Processing System, because the contracted Cray X-MP Supercomputers were denied for export to India which was under the Statesmanship and Stewardship of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, due to an arms embargo imposed by US on India during Ronald Reagan's Presidential Administration, for it was a dual-use technology and it could be used for developing indigenous Strategic Defense Systems by India.

Indian Supercomputer design experience started first with C-DOT's CHIPPS – C-DOT High Performance Parallel Processing System. It was designed to work with a maximum of 192 nodes and later the Technology, Architecture, Design, and the Product's Hardware, Software, and Firmware were transferred to a similarly formed autonomous organization in Pune which was then called 'C-DACT' in the first place to refer to 'Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Technology' as it was intended originally to sound synonymous with C-DOT, but it was later renamed to C-DAC with 5 characters similar to that of C-DOT. CHIPPS was the base platform of the Indian Supercomputer Revolution initiated in 1988 and pursued more vigorously during the start of the 1991. Then, 'CHIPPS' which used Inmos T800 Transputer Architecture and Design in a massively parallel processing structure was augmented and was renamed to call it 'PARAM' by the policy makers of C-DAC though the original architects and the original designers of C-DOT opposed to the renaming process because 'PARAM' refers to GOD in Indian Root Language TAMIL and its ancient versions including Sanskrit.

Later on, George H. W. Bush's administration also denied licensing of a Cray supercomputer after not being able to resolve if India would divert computational resources towards making Nuclear Weapons. India began developing supercomputers in the late 1980s after being refused one by the US and released India's first ever Supercomputer, namely, C-DOT's "CHIPPS" with Massively Parallel Processing Architecture and its Design Prototype earlier. That feat made the Indian program to develop indigenous supercomputers and super-computing technology a major success. Indian Supercomputer 'PARAM 8000' named by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing – C-DAC, headed by Dr. Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar, was launched on 1 July 1991. It was released in 1991 by C-DAC and was replicated and installed at ICAD Moscow in 1991 under Russian collaboration.

Thus in 1991, about three years after losing the battle of licensing, Indian scientists at C-DAC were successful in creating a new version of PARAM Supercomputer known as PARAM 8000 which was 28 times more powerful than the Cray they had agreed to buy by spending the same $10 million quoted for it. Apart from taking over the home market, PARAM attracted 14 other buyers with its relatively low price tag of $350,000. All these were achieved under the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) up in 1988 by the then Department of Electronics with Dr. Vijay Bhatkar as its Director to achieving self-sufficiency in this field. A prototype produced was bench-marked at the 1990 Zurich Super-computing Show. It surpassed most other systems, placing India second after US. These Supercomputers however assisted in the development of Nuclear Weapons and Advanced Space Programmes like India's Mars Missions and Moon Landing.

Timeline

PARAM Series

PARAM 8000
Unveiled in 1991, PARAM 8000 used Inmos T800 Transputers. It was a follow-up design of C-DOT's "CHIPPS – C-DOT High Performance Parallel Processing System" Architecture, and was later on enhanced and augmented by Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, the then Director of C-DAC and was a fairly new and innovative microprocessor architecture designed for parallel processing at that 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
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
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.

PARAM 10000
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.

PARAM PADMA
PARAM Padma (Padma means Lotus in Sanskrit) was introduced in April 2003. It had a peak speed of 1024 GFLOPS (about 1 TFLOP) and a peak storage of 1 TB

PARAM Yuva 
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.

Further developments
In July 2009, it was announced that C-DAC was developing a new high-speed PARAM. It was expected to be unveiled by 2012 and was expected to break the 1 PetaFLOPS barrier. In November 2014 it was reported that India is working on the Fastest supercomputer ever which is set to work at 132 Exaflops per second.

Param Yuva II
Param Yuva II was made by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in a period of three months, at a cost of , and was unveiled on 8 February 2013. It performs at a peak of 524 teraflops and consumes 35% less energy as compared to Param Yuva. It delivers sustained performance of 360.8 teraflops on the community standard LINPACK benchmarks, and would be ranked 62 in the November 2012 ranking list of Top500. In terms of power efficiency, it would become 33rd in the November 2012 List of Top Green500 supercomputers of the world. It is the first Indian supercomputer achieving more than 500 teraflops.

Param Yuva II will be used for research in space, bioinformatics, weather forecasting, seismic data analysis, aeronautical engineering, scientific data processing and pharmaceutical development. Educational institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology can be linked to the computer through the National Knowledge Network. This computer is a stepping stone towards building the future petaflop-range supercomputers in India.

PARAM ISHAN

Inaugurated at IIT Guwahati Campus on 19 September 2016.

PARAM Brahma
It is a supercomputer offering a computational power of 850 TeraFlop with 1 PetaByte storage capacity. It is one of the supercomputers built in India under NSM, co-funded by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Department of Science and Technology. Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, are steering this mission. 'PARAM Brahma' is supported by a first-of-its-kind cooling system called direct contact liquid available in India. This cooling system makes effective use of thermal conductivity of liquids, namely water, in maintaining the temperature of the system during operations.. As of 2020 it is available at IISER Pune

PARAMNet
PARAMNet is a high speed high bandwidth low latency network developed for the PARAM series. The original PARAMNet used an 8 port cascadable non-blocking switch developed by C-DAC. Each port provided 400 Mb/s in both directions (thus 2x400 Mbit/s) as it was a full-duplex network. It was first used in PARAM 10000.

PARAMNet II, introduced with PARAM Padma, is capable of 2.5 Gbit/s while working full-duplex. It supports interfaces like Virtual Interface Architecture and Active messages. It uses 8 or 16 port SAN switches.

PARAMNet-3, used in PARAM Yuva and PARAM Yuva-II, is next generation high performance networking component for building supercomputing systems. PARAMNet-3 consists of tightly integrated hardware and software components. The hardware components consist of Network Interface Cards (NIC) based on CDAC's fourth generation communication co-processor "GEMINI", and modular 48-port Packet Routing Switch "ANVAY". The software component "KSHIPRA" is a lightweight protocol stack designed to exploit capabilities of hardware and to provide industry standard interfaces to the applications. Other application areas identified for deployment of PARAMNet-3 are storage and database applications.

Operators
PARAM supercomputers are used by both public and private operators for various purposes. As of 2008, 52 PARAMs have been deployed. Of these, 8 are located in Russia, Singapore, Germany and Canada.
PARAMs have also been sold to Tanzania, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Ghana, Myanmar, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

See also
 EKA
 SAGA-220, a 220 TeraFLOP supercomputer built by ISRO
 Supercomputing in India
 Wipro Supernova

References

External links
PARAM Padma information page from C-DAC website

Category:Supercomputers
Category:Information technology in India
Category:Supercomputing in India