January 14, 2003

Under the very able leadership of a BITS alumnus, Dr. R.K. Arora (the Executive Director of Pune based Center for Development of Advanced Computing or C-DAC), India is about to launch its fastest supercomputer to date - the PARAM Padma. With the PARAM Padma supercomputer, capable of performing one trillion floating point operations per second, India is set to join the teraflops league of nations, which includes countries like the US and Japan. The C-DAC Param Padma will be sold commercially. The price tag is $5 million-nearly half the international price of other supercomputers. "The PARAM Padma system will be 10 times more powerful than the existing PARAM 10000. The computer can be used for various operations like remote access to life sciences, Climate Modeling, Seismic Data Processing, Bioinformatics, DNA matching, Genome Analysis, Space Programming and even commercial applications," Dr. Arora said.

Says Dr. R.K. Arora , "PARAM Padma's success is more a personal achievement for the country. It will elevate the technological status of India. The low-cost in developing the supercomputer will increase its sale ability."  For more on Param Padma and Dr. R.K. Arora, click here