Tata, the tea-to-cars conglomerate comes in at number four in the supercomputing league as America’s dominance fades…
“A computer system designed in India has made it into a top ten of the world’s fastest supercomputers…”
Washington — India has broken into the top tier of supercomputing race after a new machine built by Tata, the country’s largest industrial conglomerate, was listed as the fourth fastest in the world, marking a giant leap in its push towards becoming a global IT power.
A supercomputer developed by the Tata Group’s Pune-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), capable of a sustained speed of performing 117.9 trillion floating operations per second (teraflops) and a peak speed of 170.9 teraflops, has been rated as the fourth fastest by the internationally recognized “Top500 Listing” project.
“Computer giant IBM continues to dominate the list — which is compiled twice a year — with a total of 232 out of the top 500 supercomputers.”
The U.S. remains by far the global supercomputing leader. But an India-based company that is part of a major IT offshore services firm has just built the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer, according to the just-released Top500 supercomputer list.
The 30th edition of the Top500 List was released on November 12 at the SC07, the international conference on high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis in Reno, Nevada, USA.
“Computer experts have been carrying out this exercise, based on the generally accepted LINPACK benchmark, since 1993 and the Top500 List is issued twice every year, once in June and then in November.”
Rankings on that list, which is maintained by academic researchers and updated every six months, can be notoriously short-lived, thanks to the relentless worldwide push to build faster systems. But India’s position near the top of this list is a clear signal of its ambitions in information technology.
This is the first time that an Indian HPC system has made it to the Top Ten of the supercomputing list, outdoing such countries as Japan, the U.K., France, etc. which are regarded as highly advanced in computer technology.
The list, which is usually dominated by the United States, is also notable this time because it has five new entrants in the Top Ten, with supercomputers in Germany and Sweden up there with the one in India. This means that the system is the fastest in Asia as of date.
“The fourth-ranking Tata supercomputer, named ‘EKA’ after the Sanskrit term for one, the system uses 14240 Intel’s high-speed (3 giga hertz) ‘quad-core’ Clovertown (Xeon 53xx) processors in nearly 1,800 computing nodes put together on a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. CRL has integrated this system with its own innovative routing technology and to achieve a 117.9 Teraflop or trillions of calculations per second.”
“The BlueGene/L supercomputer – used to ensure the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable – comes out at number one.”
The No. 1 position was again claimed by the “BlueGene/L System,” a joint development of IBM and the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Although BlueGene/L has occupied the No. 1 position since November 2004, the current system is much faster at “478.2 TFop/s,” nearly three times faster than any other machine on the list, compared to 280.6 TFlop/s six months ago before its upgrade.
At No 2 is a BlueGene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s. The No. 3 system at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, N.M. posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.
According to the official press release of the rating body, the integration of the system was done using “their own innovative routing technology.” The routing is based on dual-rate Infiniband switches from Mellanox Corp. and Voltaire Corp.
Top Five Supercomputers:
- IBM’s BlueGene/L – 478 teraflops
- IBM’s BlueGene/P – 167.3 teraflops
- SGI Altix ICE 8200 – 126.9 teraflops
- HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c (EKA) – 117.9 teraflops
- HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c – 102.8 teraflops
“We would like to be in the forefront of [high-performance computing] research, services,” said Ashwin Nanda, who heads Computational Research Laboratories in Pune, India, which owns the system. The goal is to “basically bring the analytical brainpower of India to solve the supercomputing, HPC-related problems that we have in the world,” he said.
The system will be initially targeted at developing applications such as neural, molecular and crash simulations, and digital media animation and rendering.
“The supercomputer system will have a direct effect on the lives of Indians, especially in areas such as earthquake and Tsunami modeling, modelings of the economy and potential for drug design,” said S. Ramadorai, chairman of the Computational Research Laboratories, which is a subsidiary of Indian firm Tata.
“This is a completely new market for us,” said Nanda, who was attending the Supercomputing 07 conference in Reno, Nevada, where the Top500 list was announced.
“CRL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd., which is in turn part of a conglomerate that is one of India’s largest IT offshore services providers.”
The machine was constructed from “$30 million” worth of off-the-shelf components from Hewlett Packard in an architectural framework designed by Tata engineers. It will work on problems ranging from oil exploration expeditions and research on new drugs to animation and video gaming software.
India’s entry into the top flight of high-speed computing comes amid a significant reshuffle among the sector’s elite installations with America’s dominance over the sector coming under challenge.
A new supercomputer recently built for University College London (UCL) by Dell, for instance, will work on projects ranging from searches for new bespoke cures for cancer, based on individual patients’ DNA, to research on the origins of the universe.
Meanwhile, the task of writing code that exploits the full capacity of the latest generation of ultra-high performance computers is expected to have knock-on effects for computer-driven trading models used in the City.
“CRL plans to provide a “one-stop-shop” for supercomputing, supplying applications and software and sourcing hardware from partners.”
India, China and other countries are increasingly being tapped by U.S. and European firms for research and development. But of the supercomputers powerful enough to make the Top500 supercomputers list, only nine, or just less than 2%, are in India. The U.S. is home to 283 of the systems, or nearly 57%. Next runner up is the U.K., with 48 or nearly 10% of the systems powerful enough to make the list. “While India’s system ranked high, it is still a distance from the top position.”
Horst Simon, associate laboratory director of computing sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and one of the Top500 list authors, said it was exciting to see India’s entrance into the top 10 and said the country has “huge potential” as a supercomputing nation.
“India is very well known for having great software engineers and great mathematicians, and having a [HPC] center there is a catalyst for doing more in the high-performance computing field,” said Simon, who said it brings “a whole new set of players into the supercomputing world.”
Ratan Tata, the billionaire 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 … I am sure this supercomputer and its successor systems will make a major contribution to India’s ongoing scientific and technological initiatives.”
Tata’s focus on supercomputing will cement India’s reputation as a burgeoning centre for IT excellence and comes as the country’s leading IT players seeks to move up the industry’s value chain -– to move away from commoditized outsourcing services to more lucrative research work.
India has made steady progress in the field of supercomputing from the time it first bought two from the US pioneer Cray Research in 1988, at a time of a tough technology control regime. US strictures on the scope of its use and demand for intrusive monitoring and compliance led India to devise its own supercomputers using clusters of multiprocessors.
Supercomputers are typically used for highly calculation problem solving in quantum mechanical physics, molecular modeling, weather forecasting and climate research, and physical simulation including that of nuclear tests.
The term supercomputer is quite relative. It was first used in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University. The supercomputers of the 1970s are today’s desktops.