Tata Supercomputer 4th Fastest in the World

The supercomputer facility at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd, has been ranked as the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world and fastest supercomputer in Asia, according to the Top500 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 was built at the CRL facility at Pune.

EKA uses nearly 1800 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 & 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 & 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.

This 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 and Dual Data Rate Infiniband switches from Mellanox Corp. and Voltaire Corp.

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 longer term application areas would include financial modelling, seismic modelling, geophysical signal processing, weather prediction, medical imaging, nanotechnology, personalized 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.

Amazon to Unveil E-Book Reader

Amazon.com Inc. is expected to unveil its long-awaited e-book reader at a media event Monday in New York, according to this report.

Word of the Kindle, as the device is called, made its way onto blogs more than a year ago, but the Web retailer has remained mum on details. CNet reported that the reader will cost $399 and be able to connect to Amazon's e-book store via a Wi-Fi connection or with a Sprint Nextel Corp. cellular connection.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment. The company sent out media invitations for an event at the W Hotel in New York's Union Square neighborhood on Monday but would not discuss the reason for the event.

The device is reported to have a headphone jack for listening to audio books, and can be set to automatically download content, such as the New York Times.