Tata146;s supercomputer slips nine ranks

'Eka', the supercomputer developed by city-based Computational Research Laboratories has slipped from the 8 th to 13 th position in the recently-announced Top500 supercomputer list.

8216;Eka8217;, the supercomputer developed by city-based Computational Research Laboratories CRL has slipped from the 8 th to 13 th position in the recently-announced Top500 supercomputer list. Till June this year Eka was in the fourth slot. The Top500 project ranks and details 500 of the most powerful known computer systems in the world. 8216;Roadrunner8217; by International Business Machines IBM, 8216;Jaguar8217; by Cray Inc, and 8216;Pleiades8217; developed by SGI Altix secured the top three slots on the list. 8216;Eka8217; was also ousted from the top position in Asia, replaced by China8217;s Dawning 5000A, which secured the No. 10 rank on the global list.

8216;Eka8217;, Sanskrit for number 8216;one8217;, cost the Tata Group nearly 30 million to develop and uses nearly 1,800 computing nodes. It boasts a peak performance of 170 teraflops tflops or trillion floating point operations per second and a sustained performance of 132.8 teraflops . It follows a near-circular layout of the data centre, unlike the traditional hot aisle and cold aisle rows that typically make up densely-packed supercomputers.

8220;The change in the rank of 8216;Eka8217; is not a reflection of inadequate performance. It8217;s just that newer machines with a greater number of microprocessors have entered the fray. It would be apt to say that 8216;Eka8217; has not slipped in the rank. It8217;s just that others have gone up,8221; says S Ramakrishnan, Director General, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing C-DAC, Pune. 8216;Eka8217; continues to be one of the top 20 computers in the world and its performance has improved in terms of the ratio between peak and sustained performance.

Built using CLOS architecture, with off-the-shelf servers and infiniband interconnect technologies with Linux operating system, CRL claims 8216;Eka8217; is the first supercomputer in the world to use dual data rate infiniband with fibre-optic cable technology for superior performance.

Useful in various fields such as automotive engineering cross simulation, drug discovery and nanotechnology, 8216;Eka8217; put India at the forefront of high performance and supercomputing technology globally. Consuming electricity worth Rs 200,000 per day, 8216;Eka8217; currently runs 40 client applications in aerospace, automotive, digital entertainment and weather modelling. Also adding lustre to its achievements is the fact that 8216; Eka8217; did weather simulation for India8217;s moon mission, predicting the weather till Chandrayaan8217; s take-off. As Ramakrishnan puts it, 8220;The race for the top slot makes sense only upto a point. What matters in the long run, though, is that 8216;Eka8217; continues to be a matter of pride for the nation.8221;

However, he feels that in order to keep pace with the competition, there is a compelling need for the makers of 8216;Eka8217; to install more efficient application drivers. 8220;CRL should also ensure that there is enough return investment in the project and that it follows 8216;green IT8217; practices,8221; Ramakrishnan adds.