IBM India’s top supercomputer manufacturer
IBM India's top supercomputer manufacturer
Bangalore: Technology company IBM leads the list of India's supercomputers, having built six of the country's 16 fastest high-performance computing installations, according to a new compilation by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). It was followed by Hewlett-Packard with five systems and SGI with two systems.
The fastest supercomputer, however, is a Wipro system installed at the Indian Space Research Organisation's Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre at Thiruvananthapuram, followed by the Eka, a HP system installed at the Pune-based Computational Research Laboratories.
Supercomputers are built to crunch massive amounts of data for research in areas such as bio-informatics, climate modelling and aerospace among others.
The Indian Space Research Organisation machine, named SAGA-220 and commissioned last month, can carry out 220 trillion floating point operations per second (TFlops) as against the Eka which has a peak performance of 172.60 TFlops. The Computational Research Laboratories is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons and is involved in high-performance computing services and solutions.
There is a significant jump in the number of supercomputers being added in the country though India still lags behind in this area, said Sathish S.Vadhiyar, associate professor at IISc's Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC), which has been compiling the list twice a year since 2008. While only a couple of Indian systems are in the list of top 500 supercomputers globally, countries such as the US account for between 100-150 systems while China boasts of more than 50, he added.
The top 16 Indian systems had been ranked based on a minimum performance criteria of 3.11 Tflops, a bar that has been raised with every compilation from SERC. The combined supercomputer performance featured on the SERC list is 308 TFlops, with Bangalore leading the list with four supercomputers followed by Chennai with three....