India Has 4th Fastest Supercomputer

Written on 10:04 AM by Unknown

India's Tata group and Hewlett-Packard said onTuesday they had built the Asia-Pacific region's most powerful supercomputer - in a major boost to scientific research in India.

The supercomputer has made it into a top ten of the world's fastest supercomputers. In fact, it made it to the 4th place in a list of top 500 supercomputers.

Computer giant IBM continues to dominate the list - which is compiled twice a year. Its Blue Gene/L supercomputer - used to ensure the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable - comes out at number one.

Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned Tata unit, built the machine, named "Eka" ("the one" in Sanskrit), using HP's high-end "computer building blocks," the two companies said.

Scientists and engineers would have the ability to perform 120 trillion "floating point operations" per second using the supercomputer, the most powerful in Asia including Japan and the world's fourth most powerful, they said.

The speed of floating point operations, or FLOPS, is an important measure of performance for computers, especially in scientific calculations.

The system will be initially targeted at developing applications such as neural, molecular and crash simulations, and digital media animation and rendering.

"The supercomputer system will have a direct affect on the lives of Indians, espcially in areas such as earthquake and Tsunami modelling, modellings of the economy and potential for drug design,"

said Mr S. Ramadorai, chairman of the Computational Research Laboratories, which is a subsidiary of Indian firm Tata.

The supercomputer, which uses the fastest processors made by microchip giant Intel, promises to help push scientific and industrial discovery to "unprecedented limits,"

Third place on the top 500 list went to a new supercomputing centre based in New Mexico, while fifth place went to another Hewlett-Packard system installed at a Swedish government agency.

Sources: BBC and AFP

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