HINDU group of publications
Mumbai/Chennai, Nov. 13 The Tata Group on Tuesday announced that its
supercomputer Eka, which became operational this October, has been adjudged
the world's fourth fastest.
This distinction was made at the International Conference for High
Performance Computing Networking Storage and Analysis at Nevada, US.
The super machine, developed at Tata Group's Computational Research
Laboratories (CRL) in Pune, is the fastest computer in Asia and the first
one developed using corporate funding, said Mr S. Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL,
at a news conference in Mumbai.
Eka (Sanskrit word for number one), is a Hewlett-Packard based system with a
performance of 117.9 teraflops. A teraflop equals a trillion calculations
per second.
A supercomputer is the equivalent of 20,000 ordinary computers put together
but the comparison stops with power. "It is like comparing an aeroplane and
a bicycle," added Mr Ramadorai.
'Eka' was developed with an investment of $30 million (Rs 120 crore) in six
weeks' time, funded entirely by Tata Sons.
TCS, Tata Technologies, Tata Strategic Management Group and other companies
from the Tata stable have contributed to the project.
This computer will enable CRL to offer computing services in the field of
weather forecasting, oil & gas exploration, drug discovery, gaming &
animation and data mining, among others.
*The supercomputer is powered by a Linux open source operating system and it
is based on standard hardware to address the issue of application
scalability, which has been the bane of supercomputing till date.
*
The Tata Group now intends to market the supercomputers` capabilities to
potential customers. "We are in active negotiations with government and
private agencies," said Mr Ramadorai.
Group company Tata Elxsi and aircraft maker Boeing have been using the
supercomputer on a pilot basis.
Commenting on potential models of doing business, Dr Sunil Sherlekar, Head,
Embedded Innovation Labs, TCS, said: "We will be selling time to our
customers to use these systems. Another model could be to build slightly
smaller capacity systems for our clients on a turnkey basis."
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Agnello . G .Dsouza
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Agnello . G .Dsouza