India has entered the top five of the prestigious “Top 500 Supercomputer Sites List” for the first time ever, with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons in Pune, installing an HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system, ranked fourth in the world.

The supercomputer — also the fastest in Asia — has achieved 117.9 TFlop/s (‘teraflops’ or trillions of calculations per second) performance. Called ‘Eka’ (Sanskrit for ‘one’), the project entailed an investment of $30 million, which was entirely borne by Tata Sons, and was put together in a record six weeks. CRL was originally set up in February 2006, but the task of putting together the supercomputer started in June this year. ‘

The supercomputer is ready to be commercialised, and has applications in oil & gas exploration, weather predictions, drug discovery, aerospace, nanotechnology, automotive engineering, and so on.

The fastest among computers, supercomputers are used in specialised applications that call for huge amounts of mathematical calculations. The Top 500 Supercomputer List was announced at SC07, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis at Nevada in the US.

Described as ‘a milestone in the Tata Group’s effort to build a high performance computing solution’, the supercomputer facility was built using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by CRL scientists.

“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,” said Ratan Tata, Chairman of the Tata group.

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