Asia's fastest supercomputer is "EKA"

The Asia's fastest supercomputer in the world is developed by The Tata Group of india. The Computational Research Laboratories owned by the The TATA group in pune installed a supercomputer system that has achieved a speed of about 117.9 trillion operations per second.

This super computer has been named asEka (Sanskrit for “one”) is the first supercomputer to have been totally developed by a corporation without any government help and now it shares the great heights of supercomputing with a German and two American supercomputers

The cost to develop this project was about $30 million and this is now an important milestone as Eka almost restarts the train of supercomputing in india, which which stalled after the PARAM supercomputers developed by the C-DAC.

“It is a team effort rather than an individual’s efforts. This has put India on the worldmap and brought a national sense of pride,” said S Ramadorai, chairman, CRL, and also the CEO of India’s largest software firm, TCS. TCS is a key partner in the entire supercomputer project.

This computer was approximately developed in about 20months which is a great achievement worth creditable, with off-the-shelf parts, something of a global trend in the supercomputing world. ” It allowed us to develop the machine within the deadline and, in the future, will allow for easy scalability,” said Sunil Sherlekar, the head of supercomputer project CRL.

The project was very much important as it was done with a small work-force and with global partners like HP, Intel and Mellanox. But the most noteworthy achievement of the team was that it finished the project in time even after CRL lost its technical spearhead, Dr Narendra Karmarker, in June this year over differences over business model and commitment to delivery plan.

Mr Ramadorai said ,” Mr Karmarkar did do some work for us but i would emphasise the role and the integrated nature of the team in developing supercomputer.”

He added that the intellectual property rights for the development would rest with the Tata group company.

There is little doubt that the once Mr Karmarkar left, the team was able to rally around and execute the plan. There is, however, even less doubt that the team benefited in no small way by the progress he had already made by the time he left.” by the time I had left, a lot of the system architecture and design was already in place,” said Mr Karmarkar.

The critical thing to understand is that today, supercomputers use comodity parts, Eka uses the same Intel microchip that many PCs and laptops, except that it uses almost 1,800 of them! Since the supercomputer does not use parts that are custom-made, the real ingenuity lies in dividing the task amongst 1,800 microchips, finding out which one has spare time to give it more work, collect the output from all of them and put it back together in double quick time.