Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi,comp.parallel.pvm,comp.parallel,soc.culture.indian,alt.culture.us.asian-indian
From: abdutta@icaen.uiowa.edu (jit)
Subject: Indian CDAC Launches Supercomputer Using Sparc
Organization: Iowa Computer Aided Engineering Network, University of Iowa
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 14:11:19 GMT
Message-ID: <3h9eag$aec@news.icaen.uiowa.edu>

This is from INN services.


INDIAN CENTRE FOR DEVELOPMENT ADVANCED COMPUTING CREATES
                                           SUPERCOMPUTER USING SPARC
 
Computergram International (CGIN)
02/02/95
 Bangalore and New Delhi
   Created in 1988 as part of a national initiative in
high-performance computing, The Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing, headquartered in Pune, India - Poona to gnarled India
hands, and the town where ICL Plc's Indian affiliate has its plant -
has launched Param 9000, which it calls an OpenFrame flexible
supercomputer architecture. The OpenFrame architecture enables the
integration of homogeneous and heterogeneous nodes and unifies
cluster computing with massively parallel processing, it claims. The
centre says that because of the inherent property of its OpenFrame
Architecture, upgrades with either new processors or advances in
interconnect technology - can be effected with minimal difficulty.
The nucleus of OpenFrame is a scalable interconnect that can support
1,000 nodes or more. The interconnect is a low latency, high
bandwidth point-to-point link. OpenFrame has a variety of
input-output and networking interfaces, including Ethernet and fast
and wide SCS interface. It uses an SBus-to-VME bus interface. The
Param 9000/SS uses SuperSparc nodes and is the first OpenFrame
offering. The software environment, Paras 9000, is the centre's
program development environment, and includes parallel programming
extensions to a Solaris 2.X operating system. It has optimised a Mach
microkernel, and offers a parallel high performance file system,
standard and enhanced compiler optimisations and parallel libraries.
   The operating system configures the system into service, compute
and input -output partitions. The user logs onto a service node and
uses the Paras program development tools to develop a parallel
application. The Paras 9000/SS supports two main massively parallel
processing programming models: data parallelism and multiprocess
parallelism. The service nodes run Solaris, while the Paras
microkernel is replicated on the compute nodes and includes Mach-like
process management, enhanced exception handling, a virtual memory
model and interprocess communications. It supports threads, ports and
port groups and virtual memory regions and can be accessed by a
variety of hosts. The interconnect uses a packet switching wormhole
router. Each switch can establish 32 simultaneous non-blocking
connections to provide a sustainable bandwidth of 320Mbps. The
communication links are Peer -to-Peer Protocol.  Current compute
nodes use 60MHz SuperSparc IIs with 1Mb external cache, 16Mb to 128Mb
memory, one to four communication links and related input-output
devices. With some 40-odd applications in the making, the centre says
it will support parallel database management, complex query decision
support system and video on demand in the near future. Parallel
libraries, application kernels and benchmarking, and parallelisation
and conversion of standard packages are under way. The centre has 250
employees in Pune, Bangalore and New Delhi, and is seeking
partnerships worldwide. A Param 9000/AA series using Digital
Equipment Corpo's Alpha RISC is in the works, as is Param 9000/PP,
with PowerPC nodes. The Param 9000/SS is shipping now; no prices.
 

-- 
opinions are mine only.


