EKA or Sanskrit for ‘one’ has been built by the Tata’s wholly owned subsidiary, Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) facility at Pune, India at a cost of $30 million. CRL built the supercomputer facility using dense data centre layout and network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by its scientists. It has a speed of 117.9 trillion operations per second.
The fastest supercomputer according to the Top 500 Supercomputer list was the BlueGene/L system with a speed of 478.2 teraflops per second. It was jointly developed by IBM and the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The second and third on the list were IBM’s BlueGene/P with a speed of 167.3 teraflops and SGI’s Altix ICE 8200 with a speed of 126.9 teraflops.
EKA uses 1,800 computing nodes and has a peak performance of 170 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops) and a sustained performance of 120 teraflops. EKA follows a near-circular layout of the data centre, which enables the building of densely packed supercomputers. It includes common lisp object system (CLOS) architecture, Linux operating system and nodes and racks built by Hewlett Packard.
EKA gives us the ability to address applications in multiple disciplines, including software development and research, said S Ramadorai, chairman at CRL and chief executive and managing director at Tata Consultancy Services.
CRL said that it also intends to offer high-performance and supercomputer system integration, research, applications and software services to its customers worldwide in the area of high-performance computing. Additionally, it plans to offer applications such as neural simulation, molecular simulation, computational fluid dynamics, crash simulation, and digital media animation and rendering.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
