India to build home-grown supercomputers, from the motherboards up
- Reference: 1602554224
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/13/india_supercomputer_self_sufficiency/
- Source link:
Minister of state for education, communications and electronics & information technology, Shri Sanjay Dhotre yesterday kicked off the drive by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and National Supercomputing Mission. Dhotre called for India to develop “Critical Supercomputing components like the Server Board, Interconnect, Rack power controllers and Hydraulic controllers, Direct Liquid Cooled Datacenter”.
C-DAC director general Dr. Hemant Darbari said his organisation’s mission is to: “Establish dependable and secure exa-scale eco-system with innovative designs, disruptive technologies and Expert Human resource. Our goal is to develop our own indigenous hardware encompassing exascale chip design, design and manufacture of exascale server boards, exascale interconnects and storage including silicon-photonics at C-DAC”.
Minister Dhotre [1]Tweeted that the effort will “contribute to the socio-economic development of India” and “bring changes in the lives of common citizens.”
India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker [2]READ MORE
Supercomputers can certainly do that. However The Register wonders if India might not be able to achieve those benefits rather sooner by using off-the-shelf kit rather than waiting to develop its own stack.
India currently has two supers on the Top 500 list, both from HPE/Cray and running Xeon E5-2695v4 CPUs. India’s "Shakti" CPU development team [3]lists an “H-Class” design intended for HPC applications and an S-Class for enterprise servers, so the nation has some building blocks in place. Both use the royalty-free RISC-V architecture, which India has picked for a [4]national microprocessor development challenge . Just how long that effort and other Indian research would take to match the Xeons it already runs is hard to state.
Yesterday’s announcement did not include firm targets for delivery of Indian-designed silicon, never mind the rest of the stack minister Dhotre described. ®
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://twitter.com/SanjayDhotreMP/status/1315609630022623232
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/24/shakti_moushik_cpu_india/
[3] https://shakti.org.in/processors.html
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/19/india_microprocessor_challenge_risc_v/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re. Excellent
Wasn't there some problem a while back with CPUS (IIRC Xeons) not being allowed to be exported because of some EAR related issue?
Also think there was also talk of the PS3 being "crippled" by removing some functionality so an adversary couldn't use it for simulation of
certain classes of physics problems.
The "Black Hole Machine" owned by DARPA seems to have worked around this by never updating them, and running the units with a custom
Linux and firmware sanctioned by Sony or so I hear, possibly based on 1.55.
Self-sufficiency in everything, blockchain too?
Yeah right, computers can solve all your ills. Step right up for this patented, or patent-free, elixir medicine! It's the cure for all that ails you. Blockchain included!
OK, so once they produce their own supercomputers, then what? Has anybody noticed that computers are notorious for not being the right tool to solve a lot of serious problems?
(Next on the list, collect garden gnomes, something else, profit!)
Excellent
Competition is not always beneficial in life, but the sooner India and other states can free themselves from the monopolies of the Leviathan the better and more wholesome it is. In particular before an extensive copyright/trademark regime is so universally applied as to block all other innovation. I only hope the EU can do the same.