Bangalore, Feb 6: The United States' move to promulgate a new regulation to permanently monitor all end-uses of American-made supercomputers in India and four other countries, will have no `tangible effect' on the country as it has developed its own supercomputers, experts said.Indian Institute of Science' Supercomputer Education & Research Centre (SERC) founder chairman V Rajaraman said the regulation is irrelevant as far as India is concerned. He was responding to queries regarding the possible impact of the move on the country's ongoing defence, space and nuclear programmes.
Rajaraman said the bracketting of India with Russia, China, Pakistan and Israel on supercomputer exports and re-exports was an after effect of our refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and its stern stand on the missile technology control regime (MTCR).
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-Dac) director Vijay Bhatkar said C-Dac, set up under the department of electronics with the objective todevelop high performance supercomputers for various domestic users, has given more than expected results.
He said its latest machine, Param-10000, planned to be unveiled later this month, would have a computing speed in the range of tera flop (1000 giga floating point operations per second). This is comparable with some of the best supercomputers available across the globe.
C-Dac had even procured one order each from Moscow and Singapore for its high perforamance machines, he said.
Silicon Graphics (India) managing director Ashok Desai said the company did not see any impact on sales. Silicon is the subsidiary of the American supercomputer giant, who took over the cray operations recently. "However, I do expect some delays in getting clearances from the US department of commerce for systems to some type of defence users," he added.
Desai asserted that export and re-export of systems for civilian applications -- even high-end computers -- would not be blocked as a result of the new regulation.
Thedomestic supercomputer development initiative began following a US ban on the export of a cray x-mp machine to the IISC on the pretext that it might be used for defence purposes, has borne fruits with many machines coming out of Indian laborataries. C-Dac's range of supercomputers named `Param', are used in almost all fields of technology in the country.
Other home made parallel-processing supercomputers include `Anupam' and `MTPPS' for nuclear science and related studies, `Pace' designed by the Advanced Numerical Research Group (Anurag), Hyderabad for defence studies and `Chipps' by the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-Dot) in Bangalore.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
