PARAM is a series of supercomputers developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India.

The newest supercomputer in this series is the PARAM Padma. Others include PARAM 10000, PARAM 9000/SS.

PARAM 10000 was India's first TFLOPs (one trillion floating point operations per second) computer.

The success of PARAM can be seen as a great example as how restrictions of scientific knowledge turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The United States of America had restricted transfer of supercomputing hardware to India in the early 80's and this led the Indian scientists to independently develop the components required for PARAM.

The major applications of PARAM-10,000 are in long-range weather forcasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling. PARAMs in the future may well be used for India's ambitious space programme. Plans to use it for oil and gas exploration are also on the line.

External link

PARAM information from C-DAC website