Building the World's 4th Fastest Supercomputer

ngkabra writes "In November 2007, a previously unheard of supercomputer called EKA, built by CRL, India came out of nowhere to become the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world. It is also the only supercomputer in the top 10 that hasn't taken any government funding — which means it has no strings attached against commercial exploitation. That is one of the reasons why Yahoo! chose EKA for the cloud computing research that they announced at the Hadoop Summit earlier this week. Yesterday, I attended a presentation by the team that built EKA, and they touched upon a lot of the technical details of EKA, and the challenges faced in designing and building it, which makes for interesting reading."

Comments

India will be respected

[bogaboga]

India is now on track to earning the respect it deserves. Good for them! But I wonder what countries like Russia have hidden from the public. I am sure they have respectable hardware. Those very deadly [nuclear] weapons and missile systems must have had their design done on some pretty cool hardware.

Quite a baseball match last night, yes?

[longacre]

Will tech support for this Indian computer be outsourced to Dell reps in Texas?

Finally .......

[edwardpickman]

A Vista spec machine in non Governmental hands!

Re:Finally .......

[Alpha Whisky]

Please don't exaggerate, any of the top 100 could run Vista, no problem, with Aero switched off.

This is old news

[Apoorv Khatreja]

I have known about EKA for years now. Being an Indian, I try to be aware of all the developments in IT in and around India, so I knew about this project when it was at it's earliest stages.

What most people don't know is that this project is funded by the Tata Group, and is directly influenced by TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), which I am strongly related to. The initial goal of this project was to surpass IBM's Blue Gene in the field of supercomputing, but then, things went wrong (as is usually the case with Indian projects), and it landed up in the 4th position, which I still feel, is quite a big feat for a projcet funded privately.

Re:Interesting maybe

[LilGuy]

I concur. If you asked Joe Schmoe if he knew what a super computer was he'd probably tell you Windows Vista, which would be close, except he'd leave out the words "anything that can run".