India offers $100-m.

credit line to Vietnam to purchase military equipment July 28, 2013 In a first, India has offered a $ 100 million credit line to Vietnam to purchase military equipment. It will be used for purchasing four patrol boats. The credit line was agreed upon around the time India once again expressed its resolve to remain involved in oil exploration activity in the Phu Kanh basin of the South China Sea. Vietnam says it is within its rights to invite India to explore for oil in this area. But China claims that this basin is within the nine dotted line or its zone of influence. The credit line is likely to be finalised by the time the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam visits India towards the end of the year. Vietnam and India have long enjoyed strategic ties that include cooperation in the civil nuclear sector, training slots for Vietnamese military officers and frequent exchange of visits. But this is one rare occasion when India is offering a defence-related credit line so far upfield. Usually, near neighbours squarely in Indias zone of direct influence have been the beneficiaries of New Delhis credit lines for the defence sector. For example, Mauritius, whose air force and navy have Indian defence hardware, was given credit lines to buy Indian patrol boats and Dhruv helicopters. India has wanted to expand its defence ties with Vietnam into military hardware and one of the top most items on the Vietnamese wish-list is the Brahmos missile, jointly produced with Russia, which, however, has close ties with both Vietnam and China and would not want to antagonize (make hostile) either. Sources in the government wanted the credit line to be seen from the context of the overall drive to improve ties with South East Asian nations of whom Vietnams close ties with India predate the Cold War. There has been a heavy twoway traffic of high level visitors between the two countries that has led to a $ 45 million credit line for a 200 MW hydel project built by BHEL, offer of export of the Param supercomputer and a breakthrough for the Indian corporate sector though its Vietnamese counterparts have struggled. The sources pointed out that India was beefing up (give something more substance or strength) security ties with all countries beyond its eastern flank as one of the vital components of its Look East policy.India and navies of some South East Asian countries have for long conducted the Milan series of naval exercises. The Indian Navy also conducts coordinated patrols with Thailand and holds joint exercises with Singapore and Japan.

The Brahmos missile is the top-most item in Vietnam's wish-list India beefing up security ties with all countries beyond its eastern flank

PARAM is a series of gigaflop supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development
of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM Yuva II. Param means supreme in Sanskrit. After being denied Cray supercomputers as a result of a technology embargo (ban on trade; with a particular country), India started a program to develop indigenous supercomputers and supercomputing technologies. Supercomputers were considered a double edged weapon capable of assisting in the development of nuclear weapons. For the purpose of achieving self-sufficiency in the field, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was set up in 1988 by the then Department of Electronics with Dr. Vijay Bhatkar as its Director.[2] The project was given an initial run of 3 years and an initial funding of 300,000,000 . Because the same amount of money and time was usually expended to purchase a supercomputer from the US. In 1990, a prototype was produced and was benchmarked at the 1990 Zurich Supercomputering Show. It surpassed most other systems, placing India second after US. The final result of the effort was the PARAM 8000, which was installed in 1991.[1] It is considered India's first supercomputer.

PARAM Series
PARAM 8000
Unveiled in 1991, PARAM 8000 used Inmos 8000 transputers. Transputers were a fairly new and innovative microprocessor architecture designed for parallel processing at the time. It was a distributed memory MIMD architecture with a reconfigurable interconnection network.[6] It had 64 CPUs.

PARAM 8600
PARAM 8600 was an improvement over PARAM 8000. It was a 256 CPU computer. For every four Inmos 8000, it employed an Intel i860 coprocessor.[6]The result was over 5 GFLOPS at peak for vector processing. Several of these models were exported.

PARAM 9900/SS
PARAM 9900/SS was designed to be a MPP system. It used the Super SPARC II processor. The design was changed to be modular so that newer processors could be easily accommodated. Typically, it used 32-40 processors. But, it could be scaled up to 200 CPUs using the clos network topology. PARAM 9900/US was the Ultra SPARC variant and PARAM 9900/AA was the DEC Alpha variant.

PARAM 10000
In 1998, the PARAM 10000 was unveiled. PARAM 10000 used several independent nodes, each based on the Sun Enterprise 250 server and each such server contained two 400 Mhz UltraSPARC II processors. The base configuration had three compute nodes and a server node. The peak speed of this base system was 6.4 GFLOPS.[7] A typical system would contain 160 CPUs and be capable of 100 GFLOPS[8] But, it was easily scalable to the TFLOP range.

PARAM Padma
PARAM Padma (Padma means Lotus in Sanskrit) was introduced in April 2003. It had a peak speed of 1024 GFLOPS (about 1 TFLOP) and a peak storage of 1 TB. It used 248 IBM Power4 CPUs of 1 GHz each.

The operating system was IBM AIX 5.1L. It used PARAM net II as its primary interconnect. It was the first Indian supercomputer to break the 1 TFLOP barrier.[9]

PARAM Yuva
PARAM Yuva (Yuva means Youth in Sanskrit) was unveiled in November 2008. It has a maximum sustainable speed (Rmax) of 38.1 TFLOPS and a peak speed (Rpeak) of 54 TFLOPS. There are 4608 cores in it, based on Intel 73XX of 2.9 GHz each. It has a storage capacity of 25 TB up to 200 TB.[11] It uses PARAM net 3 as its primary interconnect.[9]

Further developments
In July 2009, it was announced that C-DAC was developing a new high-speed PARAM. It was expected to be unveiled by 2012 and was expected to break the 1 Peta FLOPS barrier.[12]

Param Yuva II
Param Yuva II was made by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in a period of three months, at a cost of 16 crore (US$3 million), and was unveiled on 8 February 2013. It performs at a peak of 524 teraflops and consumes 35% less energy as compared to Param Yuva. It delivers sustained performance of 360.8 teraflops on the community standard Linpack benchmark, and would have been ranked 62 in the November 2012 ranking list of Top500. In terms of power efficiency, it would have been ranked 33rd in the November 2012 List of Top Green 500 supercomputers of the world.[13][14] It is the first Indian supercomputer achieving more than 500 teraflops.[15][16] Param Yuva II will be used for research in space, bioinformatics, weather forecasting, seismic data analysis, aeronautical engineering, scientific data processing and pharmaceutical development. Educational institutes like the Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology can be linked to the computer through the national knowledge network. This computer is a stepping stone towards building the future petaflop-range supercomputers in India.
PARAM net PARAMnet is a high speed high bandwidth low latency network developed for the PARAM series. Each port provided 400 Mb/s in both directions (thus 2x400 Mbit/s) as it is was a full-duplex network. It was first used in PARAM 10000. PARAMnet II, introduced with PARAM Padma, is capable of 2.5 Gb/s while working full-duplex. It supports interfaces like Virtual Interface Architecture and Active messages. It uses 8 or 16 port SAN switches. The grid computing network GARUDA is also based on it.[18] Operators PARAM supercomputers are used by both public and private operators for various purposes. As of 2008, 52 PARAMs have been deployed, of these 8 are located in Russia, Singapore, Germany and Canada. PARAMs have also been sold to Tanzania, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Ghana,Myanmar, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. In computing, FLOPS (for FLoating-point Operations Per Second) is a measure of computer performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second. Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington.
[1]

The

company's

predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray