Bangalore: India on April 1 became the fifth nation in the world to have a next generation high performance scalable supercomputing cluster with a peak computing power of one Teraflop.

Named 'PARAM Padma', India's most powerful computer was dedicated to the nation by Union Minister for Disinvestment, Communications and Information Technology Arun Shourie.

PARAM Padma is housed at C-DAC's terascale supercomputing facility (CTSF) in Bangalore.

According to executive director of C-DAC R K Arora, only the US, Japan, Israel and China possess such a capability. He said the latest terascale supercomputing system has several hundred gigaflops of sustained power on internationally accepted benchmarks and storage of over 10 terabytes.

C-DAC officials said PARAM Padma is 10 times more powerful than PARAM 10000. They said PARAM Padma is powered by C-DAC's flexible and scalable HPCC (high performance computing and communication) software environment. The system is also accessible by users from remote locations.

Recalling that supercomputer technology was denied to India years back, Shourie said PARAM Padma is an "answer to the world", and highlighted new system's importance from the perspective of security-related matters.

Technology denial should be taken as a blessing and challenge, he told scientists.

PTI