Isro stakes claim to India's fastest supercomputer

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on Monday announced it had built a supercomputer, India’s fastest in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second (TeraFLOPS).

The supercomputer christened ‘SAGA-220’, built by the the Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility located at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, for about Rs 14 crore, was inaugurated by Isro Chairman K Radhakrishnan at VSSC on Monday, Isro said in a statement.

The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based supercomputer, ‘SAGA-220’ (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems.

‘SAGA-220’ is designed and built by the VSSC using commercially-available hardware, open source software components and in-house developments. The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by Wipro with high speed interconnect.

With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS, respectively, the theoretical peak performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS, the statement said. The present GPU system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU-based system in terms of cost, power and space requirements, it said.

The system is environmentally friendly and consumes only 150 Kw of power. This system can easily be scaled up to many PetaFLOPS (1,000 TeraFLOPS).