Parallel Computers
In India, the design and development of parallel computers in progress in the early 80?s. The Indian Government recognized the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) in 1988 with the endeavor of building high-speed parallel machines. CDAC built and designed a 256 processors computer with INMOS T8000 series processors in 1991. The other collection which developed parallel machines were at Centre for enlargement of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Telematics, Defence Research, Indian Institute for Sciences and Development Organization. The systems organized by these organizations are supposed to be the state of the art of parallel computers. It is generally decided that all the computers built by 2020 will be inherently parallel.
Next, we enumerate most important features of various generations of parallel systems developed in India.
Salient Features of PARAM series:
PARAM 8000 CDAC 1991: INMOS 8000 transputer,256 Processor parallel computer as processing element. Peak concert of 1 Gigaflop. Application software weak.
PARAM 8600 CDAC 1994: PARAM 8000 better with Intel i860 vector microprocessor. One vector processor for 4 INMOS 8000. Vectorized Fortran. Enhanced software for numerical applications.
PARAM 9000/SS CDAC 1996 : Used Sunsparc II processors and an interconnection switch made of INMOS transputers.
Important Features of MARK Series:
Flosolver Mark I NAL 1986: Used 4 Intel 8086 processors with 8087 co-processors. Proof of concept design.
Flosolver Mark II NAL 1988: 16 Intel 80386 processor and 80387 floating-point processor connected to Multibus II backplane bus for interprocessor communication. Used for solving fluid dynamics problems using Fortran.
Flosolver Mark III NAL 1991: 8 Intel i860 vector processors associated using message passing co-processor on a back plane bus. i860 were rated at 80 Mflops peak. Fluid dynamics Codes(FDC) were optimized for the architecture.
Important Features of ANUPAM Series:
ANUPAM Model 1 BARC 1993: 8 Intel i860 processors connected to a Multibus II.Eight such clusters connected by using 16-bit SCSI interface. Used Front-end processor to assign responsibilities to the parallel computing cluster. One parallel program at a time could be run. Fortran environment.
ANUPAM Model 2 BARC 1997: DEC Alpha processors associated by ATM switch in a cluster. DEC Unix environment. High concert Fortran compiler to run data parallel programs.