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The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing will export its fastest supercomputer Param 10000 to Russia and Singapore.

CDAC pioneered India's initiative in building indigenous supercomputers and has exported its earlier systems worldwide.

T O D A Y

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CDAC is perhaps the most market savvy government lab in the country. It is a scientific society of the government's Department of Electronics and is headquartered in Pune.

Now CDAC's teraFLOPS machine, the Param 10000, is also being exported.

The Param series of supercomputers comprises open architecture and massively parallel processing machines.

CDAC has shortlist some countries to export its supercomputer series to.

It is now developing multilingual and multimedia technologies besides its endeavour in high-performance computing and communications. Applications coming out of CDAC cover systems for software and parallel programming tools, specific libraries and multi-discipline products.

CDAC has already begun retailing its multilingual technology products for word-processing, database management, desktop publishing and emailing.

The Russian export deal is in an advanced stage. But CDAC has already bagged the contract from Man-Drapeau Research Pte, a Singapore based technology company.

According to the contract, CDAC will provide end-to-end solution of financial modelling for investment analysis and risk management through the PARAM 10000 series supercomputers.

CDAC expects tremendous export potential for the Param 10000 open-frame architecture fast processors because similar supercomputers currently exist only in advanced countries like the United States and Japan.

The development of Param 10000 has placed India in the league of nations that are advancing the frontiers of supercomputing in the teraFLOPS range.

As per its export strategy, CDAC will deliver its state-of-the-art, open-architecture, scalable, high-performance computers in the desktop to teraFLOPS range, embodying emergent industry-standard building blocks to foreign countries.

CDAC had earlier supplied the Param 8000 and 9000 series of supercomputers to Russia.

The company recently commissioned Param 10000 and is installing the series at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and 11 other institutes including six Indian Institutes of Technology.

CDAC is also offering the Param 10000 for electronic governance to the Andhra Pradesh government.

Param 10000 is based on workstation processing elements using the Enterprise 450 node of SUN Microsystems Inc.

Eyeing technology export as major revenue in the future, CDAC has decided to hive off a separate business and corporate centre for it. The new centre will be headquartered in Bangalore.

CDAC has also proposed to the government that around 40 per cent equity of the new business unit should be offloaded to financial institutions like ICICI and IDBI.

C-DAC is still awaiting clearance from the government for offloading equity on financial institutions, but sources at CDAC said that the company is already expecting a turnover of Rs 500 million from its new business unit.

"We have convinced the government that the corporatisation of CDAC is essential as we are in a position to supply and export our Param series of computers and various other computer intensive applications," a senior CDAC official told Rediff.

"Our research and development in major end-user-specific areas like atmospheric sciences, fluid dynamics, finite element methods, image processing and seismic data processing has immense business potential," the official said.

He said that the export project to Russia and Singapore right now is on data mining and financial modelling for investment analysis and risk management.

The project includes business intelligence, risk management, highly sophisticated scientific techniques like artificial intelligence and mathematical modelling coupled with state-of-the-art information technology tools.

The project also focuses on data of very short-term price movements, including every single trade in a broad range of global markets where the density of this information requires the power of a supercomputer to perform effective analysis.

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