C-DAC HPC Trends & Activities in India - HPC Advisory Council

C-DAC HPC Trends & Activities in
India
Abhishek Das
Scientist & Team Leader
HPC Solutions Group
C-DAC
Ministry of Communications & IT
Govt of India

Presentation Outline
� A brief profile of C-DAC, India
� HPC Activities & Trends
� Challenges
� Development Areas

C-DAC
is a premier national
Research & Development organization
under
Ministry of Communications and IT
Government of India

� Set-up in 1988 with the explicit purpose of demonstrating India's HPC capability
� Since then C-DAC has been undertaking building of multiple generations of
Supercomputer starting from PARAM with 1 GF in 1988.
� As an institution for high-end Research and Development (R&D), C-DAC has been at
the forefront of the Information Technology (IT) revolution, constantly building capacities in
emerging/enabling technologies and innovating and leveraging its expertise, calibre, skill
sets to develop and deploy IT products and solutions for different sectors of the economy,
as per the mandate of its parent, the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of
Communications and Information Technology, Government of India and other
stakeholders including funding agencies, collaborators, users and the market-place

MISSION
Provide leadership in comprehensive capability in HPC
technologies and promote HPC as a problem solving tool in cutting
edge research in Science and Engineering & grand challenge
problems.

C-DAC Activities
Science & Engineering, Strategic Sectors, Health, e-Governance, Education,
Power & Industrial Sector, Agriculture, Rural Areas, …
End-to-End Solutions
Enabling Technologies
HPC, Language Computing, Speech Technology, e-Security, Geomatics,
Ubiquitous Computing Embedded Systems, VLSI, Broadband & Wireless,
…
…
Software Technologies, …

C-DAC HPC Evolution & Roadmap
1991
1994
1998
PARAM 9000
PARAM 8000
Technology Denial
PoC
100 Mbps
17 Locations
2002-03
Main
Phase
Garuda
Garuda – Grid
Computing
Social Computing
with participatory
approach
PARAM Padma
Viable HPC business
computing environment
PARAM 10000
Platform for User community
to interact/ collaborate
PARAM Yuva
2008 54 TF
2011
1 PF
2010
100 TF

June 1987
� An Integrated Long Term Programme of Cooperation (ILTP) was signed between India
and Russia in Moscow for collaboration in Science and Technology areas.
� Scope covers 12 thrust areas including Biotechnology and Immunology, Engineering
Materials, Electronic Materials, Laser Science & Technology, Catalysis, Space Science
and Technology, Physics and Technology of Accelerators, Water Prospecting, Computer
and Electronics, Biomedical Science and Technology, Radio Electronics and Ocean
Science and Technology, and
�six selected areas of basic research in science, namely Mathematics, Applied
Mechanics, Earth Sciences, Radio physics, Ecology & Environment, Chemical Sciences
and Biology.

PARAM Series….
� With the areas identified for research collaborations, a parallel computing
system, PARAM 8000 was first installed at Institute of Computer Aided Design
(ICAD), Moscow in 1991-92 based on the then very powerful Transputer
Processor Chip.
�The Software dealing with Fluid Mechanics and Structural Analysis were
operated and parallelized on the system.

National PARAM Supercomputing Facility
� While the need and usefulness of High performance Supercomputing in Business as
well as Scientific & Engineering Applications is unquestioned and is growing rapidly, it is
not economically viable to have many such facilities.
� C-DAC has thus established "National PARAM Supercomputing Facility“ (NPSF) to
provide Supercomputing facility to various industries and other institutions that need such
a facility to process their diverse applications.
� PARAM Series housed at NPSF (PARAM 10000, PARAM Anant….)

GRID Garuda
� The PARAM series of super-computers which are hosted at different geographical
locations can be connected through GARUDA network
� GARUDA is a collaboration of science researchers and experimenters on a nation wide
grid of computational nodes, mass storage and scientific instruments that aims to provide
the technological advances required to enable data and compute intensive science for the
21st century. One of GARUDA’s most important challenges is to strike the right balance
between research and the daunting task of deploying that innovation into some of the
most complex scientific and engineering endeavours being undertaken today.
� The Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India has funded the
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to deploy the nation-wide
computational grid GARUDA. In Proof of Concept (PoC) phase which ended on March
2008, 17 cities across the country were connected with an aim to bring “Grid” networked
computing to research labs and industry.

PARAM Padma ranked 171
� The PARAM Padma Supercomputing with peak performance of 1 TF in 2002 ranked
171th position in Top 500 list

India enters Supercomputing race
� IBM's BlueGene/L - 478 teraflops
�IBM's BlueGene/P - 167.3 teraflops
�SGI Altix ICE 8200 - 126.9 teraflops
November 2007
�HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c (EKA) - 117.9 teraflops
�HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c - 102.8 teraflops
� For the first time ever, India placed a system (EKA) in the Top 10. The
Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons
Ltd. in Pune, India

8 Indian supercomputers enter global top 500 list
By Siliconindia News Bureau
Monday, 08 December 2008
� Tata Group's Eka, leading the race in the 13th rank
� C-DAC)'s Param supercomputer at the 68th rank
� Indian Institute of Science at the 213th rank
� Industrial research company at the 334th rank
� A research agency at the 428th rank
� IIT-Madras at the 436th position
� Paprikaas Interactive Services ranks at 478
�These ranks were awarded by the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim, Germany,
and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

� Total of 15 entries.
India December 2009
Summary
� The performance criteria is minimum of 1.71 TFlops.
� First 2 in the list are also in Top 500.
� The average performance is 16.49 & combined performance is 247.28 TF.
� 11 of the systems are from HP, 2 from IBM, 1 from SUN, and 1 from SGI.
� City-wise: Bangalore - 5, Pune - 3, Chennai - 3, Delhi - 2, Mumbai -1,
Hyderabad - 1.
� 5 of the HPC systems are from (CDAC), proving its status as a leading high
performance computing center in the nation.

C-DAC latest Supercomputing Facility

PRSG – March 2010

PRSG – March 2010

PARAM Yuva
Compilation
Nodes
Compute Nodes Storage Visualization
Power & Cooling SAN 1
SAN 2 Hardware
Accelerator
NFS Data &
Management
Network
Hardware
Management
Network

PARAM Yuva

PARAM Yuva

Application drivers on PARAM Yuva

Multi-disciplinary Applications

First 4 TF HPC Facility at North Eastern Zone

Recent Trends
� Many Cores onto a single die
Motivation is energy efficient performance
� More & More Hybrid Clusters
Computational Nodes + Accelerators
Computational Nodes + GPUs
� FPGA: Fixed functions, less flexible best
performance/watt
� GPGPU: Evolving towards general purpose
computing, partially/ fully programmable

Recent Trends
� RAM: Possibly magnetic RAM, faster Z RAM
Closer integration between processor &
memory
� Storage & Parallel File Systems
� Interconnects improvements
Infiniband/ Optical/ Silicon photonics etc
� New programming languages

Challenges
� Application Performance
� Parallelism: How to Scale to 1,00,000 ways
� Interconnects
� Effective Resource Utilization
� Heterogeneity
� Application Portability and durability

Challenges
� Application check pointing/ restart /migration
� Scalability
� Power
� Cooling
Green Components- Processors/Disks/Power supplies
Avoid several voltage conversions/ Power efficient UPS
Power efficient Chillers, using outside air cooling doors
� Limit impact of failure to a subset of the system
� Reliable components, Preventive maintenance and
monitoring
� Redundancy and Failover

Compute building blocks
� Processors
� RAM per core
� GPGPU, FPGA .......
� Operating System
� Virtualization
� Power & Cooling

Interconnect
� Bandwidth
� Topology
� Latency
� Protocols
Fat Tree, 2D/3D Torus
Hyper cube
Hybrid

Application Development
� Porting and tuning
� Algorithm development
� Data partitioning and load balancing
� Hybrid development tools & libraries
� New Programming languages

Cluster provisioning & Management
� Dynamic OS Provisioning
� Support for Virtualization
� Support for Heterogeneous and Hybrid Systems
� Intelligent fault prediction
Load balancing and migration

Thank You