While Eka, the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world and the most powerful one in Asia and Asia-Pacific region developed in Pune by Tata Group subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) has certainly put the city on the world map, according to the man who headed the project, what is more significant is the subsequent slew of investments the project is likely to encourage in the city along with the varied applications that the supercomputer is capable of.

“The project is significant in terms of investment in Pune. We did the entire work here and this is now available in Pune. So what we can definitely expect is a lot of activity related to its use being built around the city,’’ said Sunil Sherlekar, Head of Embedded Systems R&D who was in the city on Tuesday. Earlier this month, the Tata Group developed supercomputer, with a sustained speed of 117.9 trillion floating operations per second (teraflops) and a peak speed of 170.9 teraflops, was ranked fourth among the 500 super computers the world at an international conference for high performance computing at Reno.

Adding that the breakthrough is also important for showing the world that India can do high-end technical work, Sherlekar said the challenge before the team now is to use the supercomputer for a variety of applications, each of which will have a significant impact. “The super computer is an enabling technology and a lot of design work is capable through it,’’ he said. According to Sherlakar the significant areas where the technology could be used includes the crucial sector of weather and climate modeling which could lead to vastly better weather predictions with far reaching effects in the field of agriculture, space launches and even optimisation of airline routes. “We are in touch with agencies involved in weather forecasts and they have envisaged a keen interest in the application,’’ he said.

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