A giant step step by india for becoming the global IT power soon. An Indian supercomputer has been ranked fourth fastest in the world by an international conference for high performance computing held at Reno,US. This came true by an effort of Pune's Computational Research laboratories, a Tata subsidiary. And all that was without any Govt. support. This is the first time India could make its place in top 100.
The name of the supercomputer is EKA, after a sanskrit word 'one'. Its a Hewlett Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system.The computer has a speed of 117.9 teraflop, a teraflop being trillion calculations per second. It was developed at a cost of about $30 million. It uses the same Intel microchips as your PC or laptop uses but it has 1800 of them!
It is expected to help in areas of nanotechnology, seismic data processing and drug discovery.The list is generally dominated by technologies developed by the US, but this year, computers from India, Germany and Sweden were up at the top of the much-anticipated list.
Before EKA we had PARAM which could make upto 171th position. PARAM 10000 is in most of the premier institutes like Indian Institutes of Technology - Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kanpur, Guwahati, Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Motilal Nehru Regional Engineering College, Allahabad, Karanataka Regional Engineering College, Surathkal and University of Roorkee, Roorkee. My institute, IIT kharagpur was the last to have it in 2001.
