India's supercomputer kings add up to 308 TFlops

28th June 2011
India's supercomputer kings add up to 308 TFlops

The Hewlett Packard cluster computer at Tata Son’s Computational Research Lab, Pune remains India’s supercomputing king, clocking 132.8 teraflops, but IBM takes the crown for the maximum number of systems --six -- in list of India’s Top Supercomputers announced last week. Bangalore leads the list in the number of supercomputers, followed by Chennai. The combined supercomputer performance featured on the list, and hence the India, is now about 308 TFlops.
No 2 is the Param Cluster at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Pune (38.1 teraflops) and the third is the IBM Blue Gene at the Tata Insititute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) (23.25 TFlops).
Since December 2008, Top Supercomputers-India coordinated by the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has been an effort to list the most powerful supercomputers in India. It is complementary to the global Top500 project that lists the top 500 supercomputers in the world.( see our separate story: http://www.indiatechonline.com/top500-cupercomputers-june-2011-272.php  )
The procedures followed in the submission of supercomputers and verification the same as in Top500. The evaluation procedure is the same as in Top500 project where the ``best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as performance measure for ranking the computer systems". However in a curious anomaly, the IBM cluster at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune has been ranked no 6 with 11.6 TFlops; while the cluster submitted to the global Top500 has been rated to clock 55.11 TFlops and on this basis makes it to the Top500 at no.221. IBM announced it has emerged as the leader in the recently released India’s Top Supercomputers list for 2011: of the sixteen installations featured by SERC, IBM topped the list with six high performance computing (HPC) installations across India. These include IBM Blue Gene Solutions at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, as well as IBM Power 6 cluster solutions at the India Meteorological Department, Delhi and the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad.
SERC has been compiling and publishing the Top Supercomputers list in India since Dec 2008. This year there were a total of sixteen entries in the list with minimum performance criteria over 3.11 TFlops.
Link to June 2011 list: http://topsupercomputers-india.iisc.ernet.in/jsps/june2011/index.html  
Indian Supercomputers Home page: http://topsupercomputers-india.iisc.ernet.in/ 

June 28 2011