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The Indian government-run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has designed a parallel-processing 1 TFLOP (trillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer, scalable up to 16 TFLOPs and available on a build-to-order basis. C-DAC was set up in 1988 with the objective of designing a supercomputer, after India's bid to purchase a supercomputer from the U.S. for weather forecasting, fell foul of U.S. restrictions on exports of high performance computers to India. The first supercomputer from C-DAC, the PARAM (for PARAllel Machine) 8000 was introduced in 1991 with a rating of 1 GFLOP (billion floating point operations per second)....

Japanese supercomputer dwarfs U.S. machines LIVERMORE - U.S. supercomputers have been the world's most powerful since the first high-performance machines analyzed virtual nuclear blasts, climate change and the makeup of the universe. Now, one built in Japan with an "old" design runs five times faster than the previous record holder, a machine that simulates nuclear tests at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer hasn't quite rattled the United States like the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. But it does highlight some drawbacks of recent U.S. machines - and it has made more than a few scientists...