For the first time, India has made it to the top 10 countries, which have fastest supercomputer, and Indian supercomputer is said to be Asia’s fastest and fourth fastest supercomputer in world. This is being said as a giant leap in its push towards becoming a global IT power.
According to the report, Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a Tata subsidiary, in Pune has been ranked fourth in the extensively anticipated the list of Top 500 supercomputers. The list was released at an international conference on high performance computing in Reno, Nevada.
For India, it is a huge success because the country has figured in the list of Top 100 supercomputers for the first time. The new supercomputing list that is usually dominated by the US supercomputers but this year the list has five new entries in the Top Ten including supercomputers in Germany, Sweden and India.
The supercomputer developed by the Tata Group at its Pune facility, called EKA, has been adjudged the fastest in Asia and fourth fastest in the world. It uses about 1,800 computing nodes. It works with a a peak performance of 170 trillion floating-point operations per second.
EKA is a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. Computational Research Laboratories at Pune (CRL) has built this system with own innovative routing technology to get the speed of a 117.9 Teraflop or trillions of calculations per second.
The BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), again claimed the No. 1 position. The fastest supercomputer in the world is at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
India has 9 supercomputers ranked in the list of 500 at 58, 152, 158, 179, 336, 339,340 and 371. The second ranked supercomputer in India, rated 58th is at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The US is leading nation with 284 of the 500 supercomputers in the world. Europe ranked at second place with 149 supercomputers and Asia has 58 such computers. While in Asia, Japan has 20 systems, Taiwan has 11, China 10 and India has 9 supercomputers.
India has showed steady progress in the field of supercomputing since when it first received two supercomputers from the US pioneer Cray Research in 1988. That was the time of tough technology control regime. The US strictures actually led India to build its own supercomputers by using clusters of multiprocessors working within the country.
