Supercomputer developed by Tata Group ranked 4th fastest in the world and fastest in Asia
November 13, 2007

The supercomputer facility at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, has been ranked as the 4th fastest in the world and is the fastest supercomputer in Asia, according to the Top 500 Supercomputer list announced at SC07, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis at Reno, Nevada, USA.

Called EKA (the Sanskrit name for number one), the supercomputer built at the CRL facility at Pune, India, marks a milestone in the Tata Group's effort to build an indigenous high-performance computing solution. CRL built the supercomputer facility using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by its scientists.

EKA uses nearly 1,800 computing nodes and has a peak performance of 170 teraflops (tflops or trillion floating point operations per second) and a sustained performance of 120 teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the world-wide community to rank supercomputers based on performance.

EKA, the CRL supercomputer, follows a near-circular layout of the data centre unlike the traditional hot aisle and cold aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers, and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale.

Ratan Tata, 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. The Tata Group has supported this development activity and is extremely proud of the team that has developed and built this supercomputer, which is now ranked as the world's fourth fastest. I am sure this supercomputer and its successor systems will make a major contribution to India's ongoing scientific and technological initiatives."

"CRL's supercomputer, EKA, has put India at the forefront of high performance and supercomputing technology globally. EKA gives us the ability to address applications in multiple disciplines including software development and research," said S Ramadorai, chairman of CRL and CEO and MD of Tata Consultancy Services. "The successful launch of the supercomputer has been driven by an exemplary team at CRL working collaboratively with scientists across the Tata Group."

The CRL supercomputer has been built using CLOS architecture with off-the-shelf servers and infiniband interconnect technologies with Linux as the operating system. This is the first ever site in the world which has used the dual data rate infiniband with fibre-optic cable technology for superior performance.

The CRL supercomputer includes nodes and racks built by Hewlett Packard (HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system), which uses high-speed quad-core Clovertown processors from Intel Corp and dual data rate infiniband switches from Mellanox Corp and Voltaire Corp. The CRL team has been actively supported by scientists and engineers at Tata Consultancy Services.

In the near term, CRL is targeting and developing applications such as neural simulation, molecular simulation, computational fluid dynamics, crash simulation, and digital media animation and rendering. The long-term application areas would include: financial modelling, seismic modelling, geophysical signal processing, weather prediction, medical imaging, nanotechnology, personalised drug discovery, real-time rendering, and virtual worlds among others. CRL also intends to offer high-performance and supercomputer system integration, research, applications and software services to its customers around the globe in the area of high-performance computing.