After initial hitches the Indian supercomputer is ready, but where are the buyers?
Samar Halarnkar in Pune Monday, June 23, 1997
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!" The electronic din of an alarm system shatters the calm of the carefully air-conditioned room. Technicians scurry around what look like two giant almirahs. Vijay Bhatkar reaches forward and closes a towering glass door. "The door was open, so the alarm went off," he says with a smile.
What exactly is behind that glass? Just trillions of electrons racing through 1,000 silicon chips at near the speed of light. Behind the glass is the Param Open Frame, the latest in a decade-long mission by Bhatkar and his team at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to build an Indian supercomputer.
The Param's power - exceeding 100 personal computers running at full tilt - is enough to generate a good deal of heat. Even though the National Param Supercomputing Facility in Pune is kept at a cool 22ºC, an open door is enough to play havoc with the Param's own air-conditioning, which runs alongside the maze of circuits.
The new Param costs Rs 1 crore - cheap, as supercomputers go - and it's a brute of a number-cruncher. It can run through billions of calculations per second, an invaluable ability to meteorologists, scientists manipulating molecules to design new drugs or financial institutions storing and cross-referencing trillions of bytes of data. Indeed, the Reserve Bank of India wants to use it as a warehouse for its mountains of financial data.
The Param's a great machine, but here's the problem: the buyers aren't exactly lining up. The last Param was sold more than a year ago, and of the nearly Rs 90 crore spent on C-DAC by the Government this decade, the returns are no more than Rs 8 crore (including sales of unrelated software).
That's because the Param is struggling to go beyond its original aim - to break a ban on supercomputer sales to India imposed by the US, which feared the computers could be used for the nuclear programme and to design ballistic missiles. The Param was successful in breaking that embargo.
"The Param has established us as a supercomputing power," says Shyamal Ghosh, secretary, Department of Electronics. "Once these capabilities are established, the pressure comes off." Indeed, the US has progressively relaxed its stand - permitting the sale of increasingly powerful computers to India - as successive Param models became operational since 1991.
Experts say it's because of India's supercomputing capabilities that high powered workstations - powerful desktop computers - like those from US computer giant Silicon Graphics are freely available in India today.
Now the paradox. Silicon Graphics has sold about 50 high-powered computers in India in the last three years, its turnover rising fourfold, while the computers that are responsible for their availability find no buyers. C-DAC has built 37 Params since 1991 - most of them low-powered developmental models that are very difficult to use - but an informal INDIA TODAY survey across research institutions found many of them virtually unused.
"Param's major problem is its software environment," says V. Rajaram, professor of computer science at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. At the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), a Param 8600 - installed in 1993 when the US refused to sell IISc a then state-of-the-art Cray supercomputer - has less than 10 users.
Another computer at the IISc has also been the only sales success since 1991 for the Supersolver project of the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL). The Supersolver was geared for a very specialised field: fluid dynamics - the study of gases and liquids in motion-a crucial area for aerodynamic research. Wipro, the infotech company, agreed to market the computer. It sold none.
Indian supercomputing efforts have faced two problems from the beginning. Most computers were jerry-built from a melange of components and needed specially created software and operating systems unfamiliar to the user. Meanwhile, ordinary workstations are nearing supercomputer capabilities - today's Pentium processors have the same power as the supercomputers of 1980. It was only in 1994 that C-DAC realised that solving the software problem was critical to its future. Thus the Param Open Frame today is essentially a collection of 100 Pentium processors - easy to programme and easy to use.
There's only one other like it, at the National Informatics Centre, Delhi, where it's used to process images and translate natural resource, geographic and economic data into information systems that local governments can use. Other Indian efforts to build high-speed computers have also borne fruit, but commercial sales have flopped.
All Indian supercomputing efforts have been hamstrung by the fact that they are based on the paradigm of parallel processing, lashing together a large number of standard processors to solve a problem. The idea is simple: hundreds of chips can cooperate to do the same job one superchip does.
The problem with massively parallel processing (MPP) was that tens of thousands of man-years had already been put into writing programmes for traditional supercomputers. They use a single or handful of super-complex processors and heat up so much that they need to be kept from melting down with costly liquid nitrogen or water-cooling systems. The MPP paradigm is stabilising only now, after some 30 companies went bankrupt trying to find buyers. Today even premier manufacturers like Cray Research market hybrid parallel-processing supercomputers.
And they are expensive. A recent installation of the Cray T3E, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, cost a total of $50 million (Rs 175 crore), though low-end supercomputers could cost, oh, a piffling $800,000 (Rs 3 crore). The early Params were up to 10 times cheaper than equivalent foreign machines, but today the crash in prices has placed the latest Param at just about a third less than its competitors. And Param, as C-DAC Director Bhatkar admits, "may not be as advanced ... robust or mature".
But then that's true of most Indian sanction-busting efforts. From the atomic to the space programmes, Indian scientists learned to make do with what they have. In some institutions that had no other access to number-crunchers, Indian parallel-processing computers were used as workhorses, difficult to use but used nevertheless, in the absence of anything else. Space scientists processed and analysed satellite images on early Params and will now use the Param Open Frame to design new launch vehicles.
The days ahead will be critical for the Param. It's now supposed to be a commercial entity - and the competition is here. From this year Cray Research, now a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics, is offering its wares directly to India, subject to US Government clearance. Until now, Cray had a project office, the sole aim of which was to service India's only Cray supercomputer - the now obsolete Cray XMP installed at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Delhi. "There are lots of applications for super-computing in India," says Ashok Desai, south Asia head of Silicon Graphics/Cray Research.
When the big-money decisions are taken, Param will be at a disadvantage. The question now is whether Indian institutions and companies should be forced to buy Indian. Bhatkar sees no problem with that.
"The US Government bought only their own supercomputers and kept the Japanese out. We need this kind of nurturing." Government indecision isn't helping. Since 1994, officials haven't even decided whether to convert C-DAC into a company or hive off a marketing division.
And the Param, which for some applications is at par with the world's fastest supercomputers, could do with some visibility. It finds no mention in a listing of the world's top 500 computer systems, though it's more powerful than many of the computers listed there. "I haven't heard of the Param," confesses Jack Dongarra, a computer-science theorist in the US and one of the chief compilers of the list. Perhaps, it's time he did.
- with Stephen David in Bangalore
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