Tuesday, November 13, 2007

India's Tata Owns Asia's Fastest Supercomputer

Guest Blogger: Steven Parker
13th Nov, New York

I know a lot of the reader's at this blog are Indians and this one is for all the Indians to make you feel proud. Tata Group, which is India's popular conglomerate own the fastest supercomputer in Asia and the 4th fastest in the world. The supercomputer called "Eka" (One) is located at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in Pune, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons.

The rankings were announced yesterday at the Supercomputing Conference held at Reno, NV. The list can be found here in all its glory. Its is the first time that a supercomputer from India has figured in the top 10 list of supercomputers. Eka is built by HP and uses Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c, Xeon 53xx 3GHz, Infiniband. It reaches a max of 117.9 TFlops and Rpeak of 170TFlops. It moved from its earlier ranking of 179 to rank 4, and is quite a big achievement. It cost the Tata's $30 million to build. Tata's announcement can be found here about the entire thing.

I do not agree with Sunny's view of using GPUs for supercomputing. The cost of the hardware would come down considerably, but the cost of software would be a lot higher considering the productivity of programming the GPU. Let's see how this one turns out!

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