A new Indian supercomputer has been announced, dubbed the PARAM Padma computer. This new machine isn't as quick in terms of processor speed as supercomputers developed in the US and Japan, as it has been claimed the speed which it will operate at will be one teraflop per second, however this is ten times quicker than any other system developed in India previously.
The system has been developed by the Center for Development of Advanced Computer (C-DAC), and they have claimed the new machine will be used in areas such as weather forcasting and bioinformatics. The new machine utilises IBM's Power4 processors and will be capable of running either Linux or AIX (the Big Blue version of Unix).
The AIX version will be capable of utilising 248 processors while the Linux version will be able to use 32, due to limitations in the OS. This supercomputer may be powerful but it doesn't hold its ground when compared to China's recently unveiled Dawning 4000L, which run at 3 teraflops and utilises 644 Intel processors.
News source: ZDNet
