IBM tops 2011 India Supercomputers list

The supercomputer at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), jointly built with HP and armed with 172.60 TFlops (teraflops), has topped the 2011 Supercomputers in India list. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing ranked second with its Param cluster supercomputer.IBM, with its Blue Gene solution jointly developed with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, came third.IBM, however, had six of its high-performance computing (HPC) installations across India in the list that comprised 16 supercomputers. HP followed with five and SGI with three systems.TIFR, which was ranked seventh in the December 2010 list with a processing capacity of 15.5TFlops, improved its ranking to third this time, with a capacity of 27.85 Tflops. It replaced the one installed at IISc (Bangalore) which has a processing speed of 22.94 Tflops.TFIR has been working with IBM in areas of research in computer sciences.

The Supercomputer Education and Research Centre has been compiling and publishing this list in India twice a year since December 2008 in June and December.This year, there were a total of 16 entries with a minimum performance criterion over 3.11 TFlops (one trillion floating point operations in a single second). The combined supercomputer performance featured on the SERC list, and hence in India, is now around 308 TFlops. Bangalore leads the list in the number of supercomputers, followed by Chennai.The speed of a supercomputer is measured in FLoating Point Operations Per Second, or FLOPS, commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera, combined into the shorthand “TFLOPS” (pronounced teraflops), or peta-, combined into the shorthand “PFLOPS” (one quadrillion FLOPS, pronounced petaflops).Supercomputers are typically used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling such as computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals, and physical simulations such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion.

They were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. Today, supercomputers are built by traditional companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. IBM, for instance, has a presence in Indian HPC centres working across diverse areas as theoretical physics in TIFR, general purpose applications in IISc and weather and climate applications in departments of the Ministry of Earth Science.Globally, Japan’s K computer is the fastest in the world. Named after the Japanese word “kei”, stands for 10 quadrillion, the K supercomputer is being produced by Fujitsu and located at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. K computer is still under construction and enters service in November 2012 with 864 cabinets. It also reports the highest total power consumption of 9.89 Mw, while the average power consumption of a TOP 10 system is 4.3 Mw.K Computer retained its position in the 37th TOP500 list announced at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC '11) held in Hamburg, Germany. According to Jack Dongarra, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, and a compiler of the TOP500 list, the K computer's performance equals “one million linked desktop computers”. Its power usage is roughly that of 10,000 houses and its annual running costs are $10 million.

The global rankings are held in June and November every year. India's supercomputer Eka, however, fell 11 places (47th in November 2010) to rank 58 in the current global list. Eka, number one in Sanskrit, is built by CRL, with technical assistance and hardware provided by HP.The market for high-power computing in India, according to research firm IDC, is approximately 20 per cent of the total server market. The market for this is expected to reach $15.6 billion by 2012.