PARAM parallel supercomputer: architecture, programming environment, and applications

Recognising parallel processing as a leap-frog path for supercomputing as well as the destiny of future generation supercomputers, C-DAC was launched by the Government of India as a national initiative with a first 3-year mission of designing, and bringing into commercial a state-of-the-art parallel supercomputer with peak performance exceeding 1 GFLOPS, proportionate primary and secondary storage, along with parallel programming environment, and application kernels of several applications of national importance running on the target machine. The launch of C-DAC marked the beginning of the era of high-performance computing in India. The prime delivery of the mission, accomplished with an investment of 300 manyears of effort, has been the PARAM parallel supercomputer along with the advanced parallel programming environment PARAS and a spectrum of application kernels in science and engineering. This paper presents a summary of the delivery of C-DAC mission in terms of PARAM parallel supercomputer, its architecture, programming environment and applications. A brief preview is also given of C-DAC´s Second Mission to deliver a teraflops architecture Massively Parallel Supercomputer by 1997-98