SCIENCE-INDIA: India Beats US Ban on Supercomputer Exports

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

R. Dev Raj

PUNE, India, Mar 30 1998 (IPS) - India has cocked a snook at U.S attempts to limit supercomputer technology to the developed world by coming up with a powerful ‘teraflop’ machine.

According to Vijay Bhatkar, the man behind India’s edge in supercomputer technology, so far, only the United States and Japan have succeeded in making teraflop machines which can do a thousand billion mathematical operations in a second.

Bhatkar heads the government’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in this west Indian city, created a decade ago when the United States first banned the sale of supercomputers to India.

C-DAC then went on to develop ‘parallel computing’ by linking together smaller computers which not only met India’s needs but also revolutionised supercomputer technology in an example of a denial being converted into advantage.

The new teraflop-capable machine called the ‘PARAM 10000’ which took five years to develop, keeps India beyond the reach of recent Clinton administration barriers on the export of high performance computers whose computing power exceeds 2000 mega theoretical operations per second (MTOPS).

“The U.S restriction means that even desk-side servers for mainstream applications like banking, databases, design and manufacturing require specific clearance by the U.S Department of Commerce,” Bhatkar said.

Having developed the core technology for supercomputers from the chip level all the way to highly complex systems, India now no longer needs to depend on the United States or other countries for its needs.

In fact, C-DAC has already received two orders for its new machine — one from Moscow’s Institute for Computer Aided Design and another from the Nanyang Technology University (NTU) in Singapore.

“The 1.5 million dollar contract to install the PARAM 10000 at the NTU for its Financial Engineering Project is prestigious and is being executed along with the Man Drapeau Research group in Singapore,” Bhatkar said.

Back home, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is using the machine, which costs 250 million dollars each, to acquire geomatics capability for providing remote sensing solutions, image processing and creating a geographical information system using data from India’s own satellites.

C-DAC’s own PARAM 10000 machine installed at the Science and Technology Park inside the Pune University campus can be accessed nationally and internationally on the Internet using its special webcomputing and metacomputing environment.

According to Shyamal Ghosh, secretary in the Department of Electronics, the new computer will help India leapfrog over several stages of development and help those areas in which it already has an advantage.

C-DAC will now contribute significantly to the building of a National Information Infrastructure (NII) and establish “collaboratories for scientific research, digital libraries, electronic governance and telemedicine with the common man in mind,” he said.

C-DAC’s other developmental projects include the creation of software for quick ‘machine-translations’ of documents in English to Hindi which is proving to be a boon for administrators who need to issue orders in both languages but are often familiar with only one.

But C-DAC and its supercomputers will also help in such strategic areas as launch vehicle design for India’s successful space programmme. Critics say the same technology can go into India’s missile programme.

C-DAC computing power has already helped the creation and testing of special fibre reinforced polymers (frp) which are critical for the aerospace industry for their great weight-to- strength ration and which are on the list of items banned for export to India.

C-DAC has also developed for the Indian Navy, Computer Aided Wargaming (CAW) and a simulation package for armoured operations meant to help tank commanders develop tactical decision making skills.

The big question of course is whether C-DAC’s supercomputers will be harnessed for India’s nuclear energy programme and for the non-physical testing of nuclear weapons.

The new, coalition government led by the ultra-nationalist,

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has vowed to “review” India’s nuclear weapons option and induct nuclear weapons if the situation demanded it.

India’s long-standing refusal to be party to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), on the grounds that it is discriminatory, has prompted U.S restrictions on exports of a variety of materials and equipment considered to be of strategic importance.

“The goal of the U.S Advanced Supercomputing Initiative (ASCI) is to simulate nuclear tests and carry out stockpile simulation of nuclear weapons without carrying out physical tests,” Bhatkar said without committing himself on India’s own plans.