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Super Computers & Defence : Indian capabilities
The Role and Importance of super Computers is hidden from no one. Yet The use of Super Computers has been limited to only a handful of nations in the world who have this expertise.
In India the The Saga of Super Computer Dates backs to 80's when India was denied the "Cray Super Computer".
Since then India has made Several Indegenious Efforts which have been Highly successful. The Use of Super computers in Military is an All Together New Concept which has unleashed a new Era of "Military Super Computing"
A Recent Article Outlines the Importance of Super Computers in the Area of Defence as per the DoD, USA.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) was set up in 1992 to modernize DoDs supercomputing capabilities. The HPCMP was assembled out of a collection of small high performance computing departments run by the services, each with supercomputing capabilities independent of the others.
The HPCMP brings these capabilities together. The program provides supercomputer services, high-speed network communications, and computational science expertise that enables the DoD labs to develop new weapons systems, prepare US aircraft for overseas deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and assist long-term weather predictions to plan humanitarian and military operations throughout the world
Supercomputing Centers
The program operates 6 DoD supercomputing resource centers (DSRCs) located at:
- * US Air Force Research Lab, Wright Patterson AFB, OH;
- * Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, AK;
- * US Army Research Lab, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD;
- * US Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, MS;
- * Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center, Stennis Space Center, MS; and
- * Maui High Performance Computer Center in Kihei, Maui, HI.
Each center has large-scale supercomputers, high-speed networking, multi-petabyte archival mass storage systems, and customer support services. Customer service and data analysis centers offer services to the DoD user community.
Some of the supercomputer projects [pdf] that the DSRCs have worked on include:
* 3-D Bomb Effects Simulations for Obstacle Clearance:
This project provides a system capable of simultaneously breaching obstacles and clearing mines during an amphibious assault.
The goal is to study, identify, and verify the damage mechanisms of obstacles, both on land and in water, subjected to multiple bomb detonations. The rapid creation of transit lanes through shoreline defenses is necessary to enable landing craft to deposit troops and equipment directly onto and beyond the beaches.
* CFD for Aircraft-Store Compatibility and Weapons Integration:
The goal of this project is to perform engineering analysis, develop flight test profiles, and direct real-time flight tests in support of the aircraft and store certification process. By supplementing inexpensive lower order methods and costly, sub-scale testing, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used to reduce the certification costs, increase flight test safety margins, and develop more confidence in the numerical predictions that lead to the determination of flight test requirements.
* Blast Protection in Urban Terrain:
An anti-terrorism (AT) lanner software tool was developed to rapidly evaluate the safety of structures. This tool is a fast and accurate method of predicting loads on a structure when a terrorist weapon is detonated between groups of structures (urban terrain). Improved methods of predicting response of conventional structures and developing retrofits for these structures will result from these predictions. This research will provide the DoD community with an improved methodology for evaluating the safety of US forces from terrorist attack and for designing retrofits to improve safety.
With India Signing the Nuclear Deal, It has become an urgent requirement to devise means that can test and simulate our weapons and one such application is Nuclear testing.
As the readers might know the Indian Super Computing Efforts are centred around CDAC, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Pune which has developed the PARAM series of Super Computers.
India has Achieved the capability through which it can Actually Test a Nuclear Detonation and Without the fear of Sanctions Improve its Weapon Parameters.
HVK Archives: India can simulate N-tests in supercomputers: C-DAC chief
India can simulate N-tests in Supercomputers
Title: India can simulate N-tests in supercomputers: C-DAC chief
Author: PTI
Publication: Maharashtra Herald
Date: May 31, 1998
India now possesses the technology to make supercomputers which can simulate nuclear tests without carrying out any more underground tests, said the chief architect of India's PARAM 10000' supercomputer, Dr Vijay Bhatkar.
Dr Bhatkar, the founder executive director of Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC) which built the PARAM
supercomputer, told PTI here today that if the international community resists India's attempts to carry out further underground tests then India can make use of supercomputers by using the critical data collected from the five nuclear tests
which it carried out on May 11 and 13.
Bhatkar said the C-DAC, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and the
applied numerical research and analysis group (ANURAG) of DRDO
have the capacity to build supercomputers which can can-y out
mission critical applications.
"We do not have to depend upon any foreign country like Japan orthe USA to supply US the critical components which are needed for such omputers. India is now capable of building such computers from the commodity components which are available aplenty in
India," he said.
He said the united states was preventing other countries from carrying out nuclear tests and asking them to carry out computer simulation of the tests in their (USA's) computers.
"But there are not many takers for this proposal as it is always a danger that the Americans could get access to the defence secrets of the country which uses their computers," he said.
Dr Bhatkar said in order to promote Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the USA had launched the advance super computing initiative (ASCI). Projects are initiated under it to build teraflop range which can simulate nuclear tests and carry out stockpile simulation of nuclear weapons without carrying out physical tests.
USA has banned the export of all high performance super computers whose computing power exceeds 200 mega theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) and specific restriction exists for export to India.
But India's supercomputer PARAM 10000 is capable of performing
100,000,000,000 mathematical operations per second (100 giga- flops peak). This computer has placed India among the league of nations possessing the most powerful machine of its kind, he said.
Asked whether the PARAM 10000 computers would be used to carry out simulation of nuclear tests, Bhatkar said he PARAM computers of C-DAC is a computer which is built for general purpose like scientific and industrial research. Since it is connected with internet, it cannot be used for carrying out simulations of nuclear tests as the vital secrets and critical data can reach in wrong hands.
"But since we have the expertise, it is not difficult now to males special computers to carry out simulations of nuclear tests," he added.
The Indian Super Computers Capable of Handling Such Research ::
In 1987, the major initiatives of creating the Centre for Development of Advanced Computation (C-DAC) in Pune was launched to develop an Indian supercomputer based on massively parallel processing based architecture. US, which was unwilling to give a supercomputer to India earlier responded by clearing Cray XMP 14, under restrictions in 1988. There were conditionalities on non-nuclear use as well as in-situ surveillance by US government officials of the strict observance of conditionalities.
In 1989, the efforts of C-DAC, DRDO, BARC, NAL to develop parallel processing supercomputers gained grounds and signs of success were visible. Later on, C-DAC demonstrated successfully PARAM-8000, a supercomputer with a peak computing power of 1000 M-Flops.
....
Since Then What India achieved is a History.
Super Computers Find theor applications in a variety of Military applications like Nuclear Simulations, Designs and Complex Calculations.
Today We Posess some of the Fastest Super computers of the World, Designed and Developed by India.
1. PARAM 8000
C-DAC's decade old association with the Institute of Computer Aided Design (ICAD), Moscow of the Russian Academy of Sciences began in 1991-92 when the Department of Science &. Technology, Government of India, brought it under the ambit of an Indo-Russian Scientific Programme, popularly called Integrated long Team Programme (ILTP) of collaboration in science and technology between India and Russia.
C-DAC, has over the years established a close association with ICAD owing to the Indo-Russian collaboration in Science and Technology. ICAD, an important constituent of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has expertise in the fields of Computational Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Method, Mathematical Modeling and Scientific Visualization. C-DAC's experience in designing and installing High Performance Computers and in diverse scientific and business computing applications has ensured a good synergy between the two organizations for an effective and mutually beneficial collaboration.
The PARAM series for ICAD
With the areas identified for research collaborations, a parallel computing system, PARAM 8000 was first installed at ICAD, Moscow in 1991-92 based on the then very powerful Transputer Processor Chip. The Software dealing with Fluid Mechanics and Structural Analysis were operated and parallelized on the system. The efforts were further complemented by C-DAC by optimizing the system software tools and graphics on the installation of PARAM 8000 system at ICAD containing 128 nodes in all.
2. PARAM 10000
PARAM 10000 is a 6.4 GF parallel computer, which is scalable up-to tera flop range, developed by C-DAC. The processors of PARAM 10000 belong to Sun Enterprise 250 family. Sun Enterprise 250 server accommodates two 400 MHz UltraSPARC II processors for extra-high performance. PARAM 10000 has three compute nodes and one server node, and the total configuration consists of 8 processors.
The server is named as e250a and the compute nodes are named as e250b, e250c, and e250d. Each node in PARAM 10000 is a dual processor SMP (shared memory, symmetric multiprocessing) system having 2MB of level-2 cache per CPU.
The processors are based on SUN Microsystem's UltraSPARC II architecture, each operating at 400 MHz with 64 bit RISC CPU with solaris 2.6 operating system.
Each compute node has 512 GB of main memory, extendable up to 2 GB memory with 9.1 GB Ultra SCSI HDD (two 9.1 GB HDD) and the file server has 1 GB Main memory extendable up to 2 GB memory with 9.1 GB Ultra SCSI HDD (four 9.1 GB HDD) and 4mm 12/24 GB Tape Drive.
The benefit of UltraSPARC-II processor technology is that it offers easy performance scalability providing support for heavy, compute-intensive applications such as database management, Internet/Intranet or simulation.
PARAM 10000 system supports PARAMNet and FastEthernet (TCP/TP) as system-area networks. The system software consists of Active Messages (AM) over PARAMNet using C-DAC optimized MPI (CMPI), provided by KSHIPRA, a lightweight protocol developed by C-DAC. Also public domain (mpich version 1.1) over Fast Ethernet (TCP/IP), which offers 100Mbps speed, is supported.
PARAM 10000 has an advance programming environment with ANSI complaint C and C++ compilers and tools to profile/debug multithreaded programs. The C-DAC HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communication) software is a part of PARAM 10000 programming environment that supports development and execution of both sequential and message passing programs for writing MPI parallel programs.
3. PARAM PADMA
The Third Mission for C-DAC in 1999 had a relatively short time span - three-and-a-half years - and the task to lead the nation into the tera era. A teraflop machine cranked out data at a trillion (a million million) floating point operations a second. By the turn of the century, supercomputing architectures had evolved.
Current thinking was that the best way to achieve high-performance was by adopting a `cluster' architecture. Not just hundreds of nodes in a single parallel processing machine, but hundreds of individual computers, all strung together to create a giant system. The economy came from the individual computers, which were fairly standard off-the-shelf desktop machines - and hence fairly cheap. C-DAC adapted itself to this change and for its teraflop platform, the Param Padma, it deployed 248 Power-4 chips in a 64-way cluster of IBM machines. It clocked just over 1 teraflop at peak speed.
On April 1, 2003, the Param Padma was dedicated to the nation in its brand new setting - the Terascale Supercomputing Facility within the C-DAC Knowledge Park in Bangalore. In June that year, it took India for the first time into the ranking of the world's Top 500 supercomputers . It was ranked 171st.
The latest Param was a 1,000 times more powerful than the first. In a span of 15 years, C-DAC had built and delivered four generations of supercomputing platforms, and over 50 of these machines were in active use in India as well as in Russia, Canada, Germany and Singapore among other countries. After the United States and Japan, India was the only country to have built supercomputers for use beyond its own shores.
4. PARAM YUVA
The PARAM series of cluster computing systems is based on what is called OpenFrame Architecture. PARAM Yuva, in particular, uses a high-speed 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) system area network called PARAM Net-3, developed indigenously by C-DAC over the last three years, as the primary interconnect. This HPC cluster system is built with nodes designed around state-of-the-art architecture known as X-86 based on Quad Core processors. In all, PARAM Yuva, in its complete configuration, has 4,608 cores of Intel Xeon 73XX processors called Tigerton with a clock speed of 2.93 gigahertz (GHz). The system has a sustained performance of 37.8 Tflops and a peak speed of 54 Tflops.
A novel feature of PARAM Yuva is its reconfigurable computing (RC) capability, which is an innovative way of speeding up HPC applications by dynamically configuring hardware to a suite of algorithms or applications run on PARAM Yuva for the first time. The RC hardware essentially uses acceleration cards as external add-ons to boost speed significantly while saving on power and space.
C-DAC is one of the first organisations to bring the concept of reconfigurable hardware resources to the country. C-DAC has not only implemented the latest RC hardware, it has also developed system software and hardware libraries to achieve appropriate accelerations in performance.
As C-DAC has been scaling different milestones in HPC hardware, it has also been developing HPC application software, providing end-to-end solutions in an HPC environment to different end-users on mission mode. Only in early January, C-DAC set up a supercomputing facility around a scaled-down version of PARAM Yuva at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong complete with all allied C-DAC technology components and application software.
5. TATA EKA
EKA is a supercomputer built by the Computational Research Laboratories with technical assistance and hardware provided by Hewlett-Packard. When it was installed in November 2007, it was the 4th fastest in the world and fastest in Asia.[1] As of June 2009, it is ranked as the 18th fastest in the world and second fastest in Asia.[2] Eka is the Sanskrit name for number one.
EKA has 1,794 computing nodes and has a theoretical peak performance of 172.2 Teraflops (tflops or trillion floating point operations per second) and a sustained performance of 132.8 teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the worldwide community to rank supercomputers based on performance.
EKA follows a near-circular layout of the data center unlike the traditional hot aisle and cold aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers, and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale.[citation needed] The CRL supercomputer has been built using CLOS architecture with off-the-shelf servers and Infiniband interconnect technologies with Linux as the operating system. This is the first ever site in the world which has used the dual data rate Infiniband with fibre-optic cable technology.
6. BARC ANUPAM :
MUMBAI: Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) has developed a very high speed ANUPAM-XENON/128 supercomputer, achieving another significant miles
tone in the field of supercomputers.
The computing speed of this 128 processor ANUPAM supercomputer is 202 Giga Floating Point Operations Per Second (GFLOPS) on High Performance Linpack benchmark program and is about three times faster than the 64-node supercomputer developed in July 2002, Head (computer division) H K Kaura said on Wednesday.
This 128 ANUPAM supercomputer is built using 64 dual xenon servers as `compute nodes' in a cluster, interconnected by a high speed communication network. Each server is based on dual xenon, 2.4 GHz processors, with 2 GB memory, and 40 GB hard disk.
The present supercomputer is also more than 6,000 times faster than BARC's first 4-node supercomputer developed in December 1991.
So far BARC has developed 16 different models of the ANUPAM series of parallel supercomputers using a variety of processors as `compute nodes' and various technologies for interconnection networks, Kaura said.
The inter-communication network is designed using Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI), with a very high node-to-node communication speed of 300 megabytes per second and a very low latency of 3.5 microseconds, the scientist added.
The BARC supercomputers are being used for solving very large computational problems in the fields of Condensed Matter Physics Simulations, Electronics Structures and Molecular Dynamics Simulations, Radiation Chemistry, Atmospheric Chemistry, Finite Element Analysis of non-linear problems, Computational Fluid Dynamics, he said.
They are also used in the fields of Crystal Structure Analysis, Radiation Hydrodynamics, Neutron Transport Computations, Gamma Ray Simulations, Electromagnetic Plasma Simulations, First Principle Electronic Structure Computations, Structural Analysis and Laser-Atom Interactions.
What BBC Says ?
India has launched an advanced supercomputer known as Param Padma.
IT professionals in Bangalore
India's IT industry is highly respected
The move places India in a leading position in the field of supercomputing, normally led by the US and Japan.
There are plans to market the supercomputer internationally and build on existing markets in Europe, North America and the Far East.
India began developing supercomputers in the late 1980s after being refused one by the US.
Arun Shourie, the information technology minister, said the development of the Param Padma at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) showed India's technological capabilities.
Huge power
The advanced supercomputer was launched in the southern city of Bangalore on Tuesday.
The Param Padma has 1 teraflop of power, which means it can make 1 trillion processes per second.
Computer technology is one of India's fastest growing industries
Such power has previously only been available to countries such as the USA and Japan.
"It could also be used for defence and space applications."
The thrust of India's supercomputing work, however, will be in areas such as bio-technology, nanotechnology, weather forecasting, climate modelling, seismic data processing and structural mechanics.
Increasing market
Professor N Balakrishnan of the Indian Institute of Science said the Param Padma had put India into a leading position in supercomputing in the world.
India plans to market the Param Padma internationally and officials predict that the domestic market for supercomputers will triple from $0.5 billion to $1.6 billion by 2006.
India's earlier version of the supercomputer 'Param 10,000' with 100 gigaflop (floating point operations per second) memory has been sold to 8 countries including Russia, Canada, Singapore, and Germany.
India began developing a supercomputer after being denied a Cray supercomputer by the United States in 1987.
The US decision was based on fears that it could be used for military purposes.
The Garuda Network ::
The GARUDA High-Speed network is a Layer 2/3 MPLS Virtual Private Network (VPN) connecting select 45 institutions across 17 cities at 10/100 Mbps with Stringent Service Level Agreements with the service provider. This Grid is a precursor to the Gigabit speed nationwide Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting high performance computing resources and scientific instruments for seamless collaborative research and experiments.
The High Speed Network is being established at all the Garuda partner institutes in close collaboration with ERNET who is also responsible for the operation, maintenance and management of this network.
:: The DRDO DHRUVA Super Computer ::
HYDERABAD: Supercomputer Dhruva was on Wednesday logged-in in the city to help in defence research and perform functions faster than the existing computers in the country. The computer is 20 times faster than the Param series and will be able to perform the most complicated functions, including guiding aircraft.
The computer, which is the product of research by Advanced Numerical Research and Analysis Group (ANURAG) was placed at the Centre for High Performance Computing and Research (CHITRA).
The CHITRA was inaugurated by Union minister of state for defence M Pallam Raju.
At the inaugural function, ANURAG director K D Nayak said that Chitra was one of the fastest high performance computing facilities in the country and that such a centre would help in the development of many more supercomputers like Dhruva in the future.
"There will be more indigenous programmes. We will develop programmes useful for CFD design for aircraft and airborne systems, simulation complex systems and molecular modelling and bio-informatic applications," the ANURAG director added.
Many applications for advanced computing devices, to be developed at Chitra, would be used for civilian and commercial applications, the director said.
Meanwhile, Pallam Raju said the need of the hour was tie-ups with private companies and defence organisations.
"We will give incentives to boost morale of defence scientists to perform well. Even their working environment will be improved," the Union minister said.
Dhruva will be useful in Computational Fluid Dynamics to design any aircraft, or airborne or water borne systems. These computations involve very large amount of data, and needsuper computers with extremely high computing power and memory.
While inaugurating Chitra, Mr Raju said, This is a big step towards self-reliance in the country. The lab should also explore the commercial applications of Dhruva. However, we have a long way to go to match our technologically advanced neighbours like China.
The director of Anurag, Dr K.D. Nayak said, Chitra, equipped with Dhruva, is one of the fastest high-performance computing facilities in the country. Apart from designing aircraft, it is also useful for simulation of complex systems, molecular modelling and bioinformatics applications. A small team of eight scientists of the Anurag has been working on the project for the past three years and developed Dhruva using indigenous technology.
Dhruva has come in handy for Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, involved in gene sequencing. The Delhi University, involved in gene sequencing of E.Coli bacteria, and theIndian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore will also now make use of the super computer at Anurag.
The calculations that used to run into days will be completed in hours now. The super computer Dhruva has a speed of six teraflop (tera is trillion and flop is floating point operations per second).
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