TATA Group builds Asia-Pacific’s largest supercomputer based on HP hardware
(Top News, 13 Nov 2007 )
HP has announced a major milestone in world class supercomputing working collaboratively with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd, India’s largest conglomerate. This flagship win has resulted in CRL building the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world, which is also the most powerful in Asia and Asia-Pacific.
Just imagine what scientists and engineers could do if they had the ability to perform 120 trillion floating point operations per second. This is now a viable reality at India's Computational Research Laboratories, thanks to new HP High-end compute building blocks used by CRL to build their supercomputer this month.
HP has been working with CRL to evaluate and plan for an advanced HPC facility in India over the past year. This close partnership has now culminated in a vast computational capability—the most powerful in Asia Pacific and Japan—a top ranking entry into the TOP500 Supercomputer list, which catalogs the world's 500 most powerful installed technical and commercial computer systems. CRL will use the system to push scientific and industrial discovery to unprecedented limits. A case in point—engineers will now be able to model particle dynamics at ultra high resolution—allowing for significant breakthroughs in fields such as nano-photonics and medicine.
HP's c-Class BladeSystem technology enabled CRL to put this supercomputer capability in place in a record one-month period. Less than twenty days after the first hardware arrived, the system was successfully running benchmarks at full scale and was turned over to early application users.
HP and CRL consider this system, named "Eka", which means the "one" in Sanskrit, a stepping-stone for CRL’s Petaflops Project. The groundwork has been laid in terms of advanced interconnects, on hybrid architectures, and algorithms and more milestones are on the anvil from the partnership between CRL and HP.
The Eka system is one of the first implementations on Fiber Optical Infiniband cables, which have proven very reliable at lengths greater than those generally achieved by copper alternatives.
The 2.5MW of captive power being generated to keep the Eka system going was a catalyst for Computational Research Labs to create a new data center model for Dense Data Center Layout and Innovative Network Routing Technology that will see advances for HPC future products.
