B'luru pips Pune to host India's fastest supercomputer

IISc's 'SahasraT' can clock a peak performance of 1.46 petaflops

 The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru has overtaken the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) Pune in hosting the most powerful supercomputer in the country.

Previously, in a 2014 list, Pune held the number one position in the country. At the international level, China hosts the most powerful supercomputer in the world, having overtaken even the United States, which has been leading the world for decades.

IISc’s new supercomputer, a Cray XC40, costing Rs 82 crore or $13 million, is placed in the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre and beats IITM’s Aaditya. “SahasraT” clocks a total peak performance of 1.46 petaflops -  one petaflop is 10 to the power of 15 mathematical computations per second.

“Scientists are beaming with pride and are now ready to undertake a lot more experiments than before,” a scientist said. The supercomputers help researchers in varied domains – analysing and predicting weather and climate, making minute calculations in biology, aerospace, mathematics, chemistry, oceanography, meteorology and defence. Minute calculations have to be made in achieving accuracy in developing a fighter aircraft or to understand why the cellular pathways in the body are blocked – such complex fields require very high supercomputing powers that would save time and energy, and effectively enhance the speed of research projects.

“SahasraT” carried out interesting experiments on its launch. An entire landing sequence of a high-lift wing was simulated using complex physics and a hot over-pressured bubble was also simulated using the new machine. IISc has three IBM super computers – one each at the Department of Physics, the Supercomputer Education and Research and the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

 Aeronautical Development Agency too has two HP supercomputers, while the CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute has one more, other than the one in Top 10.

In December 2012, Bengaluru had four of 26 supercomputers, and in December 2011, when Pune was the topper, the City had five of 21 supercomputers. In December 2011, the combined peak performance was 404.71 teraflops, while in December 2012, the combined performance was 1.09 petaflops.

 The country is spending Rs 10,000 crore to set up next generation supercomputers in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

The Chinese supercomputer Tihane-2 is the most powerful in the world. Developed at China’s National University of Defence Technology, it can reach speeds of 33.86 petaflops per second — quadrillions of calculations per second. The US-based Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, comes second at 17.59 petaflop/s worth of computing power. Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, is third with 17.17 petaflop/s.

The US remains the leading consumer of supercomputers, with 265 of the top 500 systems, up from 253. China is the second largest consumer of supercomputers, leaving Japan in the third position.