eurEKA! Tata develops world146;s fourth fastest supercomputer

India has entered the top five of the prestigious 8220;Top 500 Supercomputer Sites List8221; for the first time ever...

India has entered the top five of the prestigious 8220;Top 500 Supercomputer Sites List8221; for the first time ever, with Computational Research Laboratories CRL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons in Pune, installing an HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system, ranked fourth in the world.

The supercomputer 8212; also the fastest in Asia 8212; has achieved 117.9 TFlop/s 8216;teraflops8217; or trillions of calculations per second performance. Called 8216;Eka8217; Sanskrit for 8216;one8217;, the project entailed an investment of 30 million, which was entirely borne by Tata Sons, and was put together in a record six weeks. CRL was originally set up in February 2006, but the task of putting together the supercomputer started in June this year. 8216;

The supercomputer is ready to be commercialised, and has applications in oil 038; gas exploration, weather predictions, drug discovery, aerospace, nanotechnology, automotive engineering, and so on.

The fastest among computers, supercomputers are used in specialised applications that call for huge amounts of mathematical calculations. The Top 500 Supercomputer List was announced at SC07, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis at Nevada in the US.

Described as 8216;a milestone in the Tata Group8217;s effort to build a high performance computing solution8217;, the supercomputer facility was built using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by CRL scientists.

8220;The Tata group has supported this development activity and is extremely proud of the team that has developed and built this supercomputer, which is now ranked as the world8217;s fourth fastest,8221; said Ratan Tata, Chairman of the Tata group.

Said S Ramadorai, chairman of CRL and CEO 038; MD of Tata Consultancy Services TCS, 8220;We have achieved, in my view, an impossible feat,8221; and added that the CRL team was supported by scientists and engineers from TCS. The project is ready for commercialisation and apart from external customers, even Tata group companies themselves could avail of this facility.

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The supercomputer has been built using CLOS Architecture with off-the-shelf servers and Infiniband Interconnect technologies with Linux as the operating system and high speed quad-core Clovertown processors from Intel Corp. The chief difference between a supercomputer and a mainframe is that a supercomputer channels all its power into executing a few programs as fast as possible, whereas a mainframe uses its power to execute many programs concurrently.

World8217;s Top 5 Supercomputers

1. BlueGene/L System IBM US

2. BlueGene/P system, IBM Germany

3. Silicon Graphics SGI, New Mexico

4. Eka, CRL arm of Tata Sons India.

5. HP Cluster Platform Sweden

EKA FEATURES

8226;It uses nearly 1,800 computing nodes and has a peak performance of 170 Teraflops TFlops or trillion floating point operations per second and a sustained performance of 120 Teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the world-wide community to rank supercomputers

8226;The supercomputer follows a near-circular layout of the data centre unlike the traditional hot aisle 038; cold aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale

8226;It includes nodes and racks built by Hewlett Packard which uses high speed quad-core Clovertown processors from Intel Corp and dual data rate infiniband switches from Mellanox Corp and Voltaire Corp.