India’s PARAM Supercomputer Ranked Among World’s Most Power Efficient Systems

India-made super computer PARAM Yuva II has been ranked 44^th in the prestigious Green500 List for Super Computers. It was announced at the Super Computing Conference in Denver, Colorado. Created by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing’s (C-DAC), PARAM is now India’s most power efficient computing system; Asia’s 9^th and 44^th in the World ranking of such powerful computing systems.

Param, which means supreme in Sanskrit, is a series of gigaflop supercomputers, designed and assembled by C-DAC in Pune, India. Param 8000 was India’s first Super Computer which was unveiled in 1991, 100% designed and developed in India.

Importance of Energy Consumption

Supercomputers in general consume lots of energy, which produces immense heat. To negate this heat, these systems are required to install necessary cooling technologies as well, which makes them more expensive and costly to maintain.

Hence, to encourage institutions and corporations to create more energy efficient supercomputers, which can consume less power and deliver higher output, Green500 ranks supercomputers all over the world based on the energy consumption parameters.

Usage of Param:

The latest in the series, Param Yuva II was developed at an expenditure of Rs 16 crore and unveiled on February 2, 2013. It performs at a peak of 524 teraflops and consumers 35% less energy compared to the last of the series: Param Yuva.

Then whole design of Param Yuva II has been based around its usage in the fields of space, bioinformatics, weather forecasting, seismic data analysis, aeronautical engineering, scientific data processing and pharmaceutical development along with assistance in nuclear technology as well. Institutions such as IIT, IIM etc can link to it via National Knowledge Network as well.

Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Technology has congratulated C-DAC, Pune for creating such high performance yet low on energy consumption supercomputer inside India, and said, “Supercomputing is very important for all-round advancement in the country, and the government is planning a big impetus for capacity-building and advanced research and development in this area.”

Deployment of Param:

Param series of supercomputers can be used by both public and private enterprises for various usages. As of 2008, 52 Params have been deployed all over the world, which includes countries such as Russia, Singapore, Germany and Canada.

Params have also been sold to Tanzania, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Ghana, Myanmar, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

This new development is another big achievement in India’s Technological and Scientific endeavors. Certainly, a great way to start 2014!