NEW DELHI, India: The Soviet Union has offered India a supercomputer with “no Strings attached” after reports here that the United States had decided to sell Delhi an “inferior” model.
Soviet Ambassador V.N. Rykov told’ a news conference on Friday in Madras, southern India, that Moscow was prepared to sell India supercomputers that could perform one million calculations a second.
“Our supercomputers are as good as the ones in the United States”, Mr. Rykov was quoted as saying.
“It was wrong to think that Moscow was behind the West in computer technology”, he said adding that the Soviet offer would have “no strings attached”.
Soviet scientists are now working to develop a machine that could perform one billion calculations a second, the Ambassador added.
Reports said here Friday that the United States had offered India a supercomputer of limited capabilities and not the state-of-the-art giant New Delhi had been seeking.
An agreement on the sale was reached in 1986 but on Friday, the New York Times quoted an unnamed member of the White House National Security Council as saying that United States was not obliged to supply any computer India requested.
India wanted the multimillion dollar Cray XMP/24 computer with a 32Mega Byte memory, said to be one of the fastest in the world.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 17, 1987
