Tata’s supercomputer ranked 4th fastest in the world and fastest in Asia

New Delhi: The supercomputer facility at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd, has been ranked as the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world and fastest supercomputer in Asia, according to the Top500 Supercomputer list announced at SC07, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis at Reno, Nevada, USA.

Called EKA (the Sanskrit name for number one), the supercomputer built at the CRL facility at Pune, India, marks a milestone in the Tata group’s effort to build an indigenous high performance computing solution. CRL built the supercomputer facility using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by its scientists.

EKA uses nearly 1800 computing nodes and has a peak performance of 170 Teraflops (TFlops or Trillion Floating Point Operations per Second) and a sustained performance of 120 Teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the world-wide community to rank supercomputers based on performance.

EKA, the CRL supercomputer follows a near-circular layout of the data centre unlike the traditional Hot Aisle & Cold Aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale.

Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata group, said: “High performance computing solutions have an ever-increasing role in the scientific and new technological space the world over. The Tata group has supported this development activity and is extremely proud of the team that has developed and built this supercomputer, which is now ranked as the world’s fourth fastest. I am sure this supercomputer and its successor systems will make a major contribution to India’s ongoing scientific and technological initiatives.”

S. Ramadorai, chairman of CRL and CEO & MD of Tata Consultancy Services, stated, “CRL’s supercomputer, EKA, has put India at the forefront of high performance and supercomputing technology globally. EKA gives us the ability to address applications in multiple disciplines including software development and research. The successful launch of the supercomputer has been driven by an exemplary team at CRL working collaboratively with scientists across the Tata group."

TCS