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CDAC tech may put supercomputers in the grey market!

SAN will allow very fast data transfer among processors in a supercomputing environment or a local area network.

T O D A Y

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With SAN technology, it will be possible to achieve speeds of supercomputers from commercially available chips like the Pentium-II connected in parallel, either in a single-unit environment or a LAN.

This will mean that office networks will be transformed into a supercomputer working several thousand times faster than individual chips. Most importantly, SAN will make assembling supercomputers as easy as putting together PCs.

CDAC gave details of its technology map during a presentation on its third mission in Pune last week.

The mission starting this year will focus primarily on SAN and related technologies like hardware programmable logic libraries to make high-end computing more user-friendly.

SAN is essentially a switching system that shifts data and commands back and forth among several chips in a parallel network at pico-second speeds to achieve the effect of a single powerful computer.

CDAC Executive Director R K Arora said the third mission would concentrate on supercomputer applications in areas never through possible before such as banking, financial modelling, insurance, telecommunications and electronic governance.

With a powerful computer as the backbone of a banking network, a bank could offer services such as online transaction processing across hundreds of branches.

A stock brokerage company could track share price movement of thousands of scrips in several stock exchanges.

He said in addition to the new applications, the next generation of supercomputers will concentrate on achieving higher performances in traditional areas like weather forecasting, seismic data processing and space.

The third mission has a budget of Rs 495 million that includes government funding of Rs 395 million and CDAC's contribution of Rs 100 million.

The mission is expected to be completed by June 2002.

CDAC has earned a revenue of Rs 250 million during 1997-98 form offering supercomputing solutions and is expecting a growth of 50 during 1998-99.

During the year, it sold a PARAM 10000 system to a Singapore stock brokerage firm for financial modelling applications at an estimated price of about Rs 100 million.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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