PARAM is a series of supercomputers developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM Padma, which reached no. 171 on the TOP500 in 2003. Others include PARAM 10000 and PARAM 9000/SS. The PARAM 10000 was India's first TFLOPS computer. A supercomputer is a computer that led the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... Centre for Development of Advanced Computing - Mumbai (C-DAC - Mumbai, formerly known as National Centre for Software Technology) is a scientific society of the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. ... , Pune (Marathi: पुणे), is a city located in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. ... The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful publicly-known computer systems in the world. ... In computing, FLOPS (or flops) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. ...

The success of PARAM can be seen as a great example as how restrictions of scientific knowledge turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The USA's supercomputing hardware embargo of India in the early 80s forced the Indian scientists to independently develop the components required for PARAM. The various components used in the PARAM series were Sun UltraSPARC II, later IBM POWER 4 processors , Ethernet , and AIX Operating System. For delayed access after publication, see Embargo (academic publishing). ...

C-DAC has also developed a high performance System Area Network called the PARAMNet-II having transfer speeds of up to 2.5 Gbit/s and latencies as low as 10 microseconds. In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (sometimes written bitrate) is the frequency at which bits are passing a given (physical or metaphorical) point. It is quantified using the bit per second (bit/s) unit. ... Lag is a common term used to describe a symptom often encountered in computing and especially networked systems, where results of actions appear much later than expected. ... To help compare orders of magnitude of different times this page lists times between 10−6 seconds and 10−5 seconds (1. ...

The major applications of PARAM 10000 are in long-range weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling. PARAMs in the future may well be used for India's space programme. Plans to use it for oil and gas exploration are also on the line. Modern weather predictions aid in timely evacuations and potentially save lives and property damage Weather map of Europe, 10 December 1887 Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a future time and a given location. ... Synthetic aperture radar image of Death Valley colored using polarimetry In the broadest sense, remote sensing is the measurement or acquisition of information of an object or phenomenon, by a recording device that is not in physical or intimate contact with the object. ... Drug design is the approach of finding drugs by design, based on their biological targets. ... The backbone dihedral angles are included in the molecular model of a protein. ... Oil exploration is the search by petroleum geologists for hydrocarbon deposits beneath the Earths surface. ...

Hardware Resources:

Configuration : 54 Nos. of 4-Way SMP nodes and 1 No. of 32-Way SMP node.

No. of Processors : 248 (Power 4@1GHz).

Aggregate Memory : 0.5 TeraBytes (@ 8GB per node and 64GB per large SMP node).

Internal Storage : 4.5 TeraBytes (@ 72GB per node and 576GB per large SMP node).

Operating System : AIX 5L .

Aggregate Peak Computing Power : 1005 GFs (~1 TF).

External links

• PARAM information from C-DAC website