Bangalore: At $ 5 million, India's soon to be launched one teraflop PARAM Padma supercomputer is half the international price and it has a huge potential for exports to the global market, top officials indicated.

"We are looking at both (domestic and overseas market). We do know that there are countries that need supercomputing power. We would be in a position to offer them solutions," said Rajeeva Ratna Shah, secretary, Department of Information Technology (IT), Union Ministry of Communications and IT.

R K Arora, executive director of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) which developed the supercomputer, said PARAM Padma has a price tag of $ 5 million for the overseas market which, he added, is half the international price.

Shah, speaking to reporters here on the night of December 16 after the inauguration of high performance computing (HPC) Asia 2002, said 52 Param series machines are in use now, 45 in India, four in Russia and one each in Germany, Canada and Singapore.

Officials said it's highly likely that Russia would place orders for PARAM- Padma. "They have all the other (PARAM) machines. I don't see any reason why they won't (place order) do. They are quite loyal to PARAM. We definitely hope they do that," Shah said.

PARAM-Padma is C-DAC's next generation high performance scalable computing cluster, currently with a peak computing power of one teraflop. Shah said PARAM-Padma can be scaled up to 16 teraflops. He said PARAM Padma would be launched in the next one month.

Shah said the government has allocated Rs 130 crore for the supercomputing area in the 10th Plan (2002-2007), adding, an I-grid, linking HPC sites in different locations in the country, is proposed to be set up.

He said there are plans to come out with a India nano initiative under which a core facility would be established in the country with half-a-dozen or more regional centres dealing in areas such as nano electronics, nano computing, nano informatics and nano electro mechanical systems.

Shah said his department and that of the Science and Technology, whose secretary Prof V S Ramamurthy was present, are working together to draw up a road map for the country in the nano science and technology area.

Ramamurthy said his department has allocated Rs 100 crore for nano science and technology in the tenth plan.

Arora said supercomputing market in India is projected by International Data Corporation to grow from the current level of $ 0.5 billion to $ 1.6 billion in 2006.

According to him, at least 50 academic institutions in India are teaching HPC at graduate/post graduate levels.

Meanwhile, around 300 HPC specialists, researchers, academics and government planners are attending the HPC Asia 2002, which is the sixth international conference/exhibition on HPC in Asia Pacific region. Being held for the first time in India, it closes on December 19.

PTI