NVIDIA, IIT Delhi tie-up to build supercomputer

Will jointly establish research lab to help country reach its goal of achieving exascale computing by 2017

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NVIDIA today announced that it is collaborating with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi) to establish a research lab to help the country reach its goal of achieving exascale computing by 2017.

The Indian government has proposed major investments to upgrade the country’s supercomputing infrastructure and develop an exaflop – or 1,000 petaflops – supercomputer.

The new Exascale Research Lab (ERL), co-developed by NVIDIA and IIT Delhi, will help the nation achieve this goal by providing advanced ongoing research, testing, and technology development in a variety of areas, including processor architecture, circuits, memory architecture, high-speed signaling, programming models, algorithms, and applications, said the company in a release.

The lab will also apply its work to address next-generation scientific challenges in computer science, nanotechnology, material science, power engineering, and other domains.

“The Exascale Research Lab can potentially help India leapfrog ahead in the supercomputing world,” said Vishal Dhupar, managing director of NVIDIA India. “The lab’s high-performance, energy efficient NVIDIA GPU accelerators will enable Indian researchers to build next-generation supercomputing technologies while maximizing costs and power savings—a critical challenge to overcome for the success of any exascale initiative.”

In 2007, Eka supercomputer had become the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world. Tata group's Computer Research Laboratories, that built the computer was acquired by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) this year.

More than a dozen universities and research institutions across India have collaborated with NVIDIA to drive adoption of GPU-accelerated computing, advancing research across a range of scientific and engineering fields. The development of exascale computing systems, which would be hundreds of times faster than most of today’s petascale systems, will enable innovation and breakthroughs in biology, earth sciences, genomics, life sciences, medicine, materials science, energy, national security, and many other scientific domains.

“NVIDIA and IIT Delhi share the common vision of developing technologies that boost computing performance to exascale levels in order to help find solutions to next-generation problems,” said Dr Subodh Kumar, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Delhi. “Working with NVIDIA presents significant opportunities for innovation. The pool of talent available at our institute coupled with the access to the latest GPU technology is a promising prospect that will surely propel our race to creating radical, ground-breaking technologies.”

IIT Delhi will provide the infrastructure for the Exascale Research Lab, including software and computing systems, and will maintain an active research program on exascale development and GPU computing. In addition to GPU accelerators, NVIDIA will provide access to its supercomputing and scientific application domain expertise and marketing support.