Supercomputer another feather in Tatas' cap

India hosts the world's fourth-fastest supercomputer, and the most powerful one in the Asia and Asia-Pacific regions, now that a supercomputer from a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), has been ranked fourth among 500 supercomputers the world over.

The list was announced at an International Conference for High Performance Computing at Reno (California), USA, yesterday night.

Called Eka, which means number one in Sanskrit, the Hewlett-Packard supercomputer was built in a record time of 6 weeks with an investment of $30 million (around Rs 118 crore), and has been installed at the CRL facility in Pune.

CRL integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved 117.9 TFlop (`teraflops' or trillions of calculations per second) performance.

N Seetha Rama Krishna, Project Manager CRL, said, "The key differentiating factor is that this system is not proprietary. We did not want to be termed as using propriety technology such as Solaris or others, hence we went for Linux, which is something that is available in the public domain. Secondly, any contribution by the Tata's should go back in to the public domain."

Incidentally, it's the first time ever that India has figured in the 'Top-10 Supercomputer Sites' list. A total of nine supercomputers developed in India have appeared in the Top 500 list, including one more system (179th) developed at Tata Sons' wholly-owned subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in Pune, where Eka was developed.

Others include a system developed at the Indian Institute of Science (58th) and six IBM systems (ranked at 152nd, 158th, 336th, 339th, 340th and 371st) developed in the country.

The latest list shows five new entrants in the Top-10, which includes sites in the US, Germany, India and Sweden. IBM once again dominated the competition in the semi-annual rankings of supercomputers with its BlueGene System which it jointly developed with the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). BlueGene has occupied the numero uno position since November 2004.

A case in point is the simulation of polymer nanofibers, which was done by CRL. Around 3 lakh carbon atoms with 10 million time steps ran for 36 hours on 6000 central processing unit (cpu) cores. A PC would have taken approximately 500 days to perform the same task.

Similarly, CRL used the system for aircraft modeling using 33 million cells. The system ran for 17 hours on 168 cpu cores, thus saving on expensive wind-tunnel experiments. Major universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users of supercomputers.

"We have been in dialogue with the government and with other industry players but we did not get into any commitment as we wanted to have something in hand," said S Ramadorai, chairman of CRL and CEO & MD of TCS. CRL is already working with Tata Elexis for animation work.

Sunil Sherlekar, head embedded innovation labs, TCS said, "A lot of usage for this technology can come from within the Tata Group. We are in touch with Tata Technologies. Besides, TCS can also use it for commercial activities."

However, supercomputers of today may become tomorrow's normal computers. Introduced in the 1960s, they were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at the Control Data Corporation, and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company "� Cray Research. Cray, ironically, never used the word "supercomputer".

Today, supercomputers are typically custom designs produced by companies such as IBM and HP. Cray still specialises in building supercomputers, though. The Cray-2 was the world's fastest computer from 1985 to 1989.

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Fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world

Most powerful supercomputer in Asia

World's first to be built and owned using corporate funding

Built in a record time of six weeks

1,794 blades with dual-core Intel zeon processors

Total memory is 28 terabytes

Storage of 80 terabytes with 5.2 GB per second throughput

Floor area "� 4,000 sq ft