India working on building fastest supercomputer
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India-made super computer PARAM Yuva II had been ranked 44th in the prestigious Green500 List for Super Computers.
Top science centres in the country like ISRO, IISc and select IITs have started work on a mission to build and run the fastest supercomputer that will work at exaflops per second, faster than the current Petaflops performance worldwide.
There is no exaflop supercomputer in the world yet and the first one is expected to emerge around 2019-2020, which is exactly when India has planned to launch its own.
India’s proposed new supercomputer is set to work at 132 exaflops per second as against an 1 exaflops per second machine being built by Cray Incorporated, the iconic American computer company which has projected that its machine would be ready by 2020.
The IISc-Isro project has the backing of the Centre which has set aside Rs 11,000 crore for its development (roughly $2 bn), apart from support to the other major initiative of having 100-150 supercomputers at the local, district and national levels under a national programme.
Prof N Balakrishnan, Professor at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) and Associate Director, IISc, told Deccan Herald:
“The world does not have an exaflop supercomputer yet. The first one is to come up around 2019. Research work on exaflops is underway at IISC, Isro and a few IITs and C-DAC for India’s own proposed exaflop supercomputer. It is a collective project and scientists from around the country are involved in it.”
But what India’s science institutions are working on is no easy task, with the senior professor expressing caution about the project.
“Taking up research on exaflops itself is a big step. An exaflop machine is not only hard to build, but it is also very difficult to just run it. The system requires a level of energy way above normal levels. We need to have energy-efficient systems in place to build and run this machine. Higher the energy consumed, higher the costs. Good system and energy management will be crucial in cutting down costs.” India’s supercomputer program was initiated in the late 1980’s when the US government launched sanctions against India that was seeking to establish supercomputing base in the country. The US thinking was that India would use the same for military objectives, not just civilian, and so, is best denied.
But India managed to come up with PARAM 8000 supercomputer, considered India’s first. Built in 1990 by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, it was replicated and installed at ICAD Moscow in 1991 with Russian collaboration. The fastest supercomputer in India now is the one at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, the second fastest one at Pune’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and the third fastest at Bangalore’s CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute.
Source:-
India working on building fastest supercomputer
>> In computing, flops is an acronym to measure computing performance. An average personal computer can go up to 7.5 gigaflops.
>> A performance of 132.8 exaflops means 132 quintillion floating operations per second. A quintillion has 18 zeros (a million has six).
>> India, earlier in 2007 had the world's fourth fastest indigenously-developed supercomputer with a performance of 172.5 teraflops (172 trillion flops), which has been enhanced to 220 teraflops.
>> As of June 2014, India has 9 systems on the
Top500 list ranking 52, 101, 119, 123, 132, 136, 281, 441 and 483.
Any updates? What happened to this project?
http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi...a-pipedream/story-ygHlMhu8k8LmNoqm7c43GI.html
http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi...a-pipedream/story-ygHlMhu8k8LmNoqm7c43GI.html
Reality check: India's 2017 'fastest supercomputer' plan a pipedream
India’s plans to try and develop by 2017 a supercomputer much faster than any available today are unrealistic and impractical because of technological constraints that have hobbled similar efforts the world over, global and Indian experts have cautioned.
Speaking to
HT, these experts – including senior officers of the very government agency tasked with building the supercomputer – have pointed to the challenges of building such a machine anytime in the near future.
A single supercomputer with the speeds proposed by the government will need to be wired to a dedicated nuclear plant as its power supply and will consume the electricity used by over 2 million Indians or 5 lakh homes. That’s apart from the power required to cool it.
And this is a best case scenario.
“It will not be possible to build an exaflop speed supercomputer by 2017,” said Pradeep K Sinha, director of High Performance Computing (HPC) at the Centre for Development of Advanced Technologies (C-DAC), referring to computing speeds the government project aims to reach. “I myself will say that.”
“But we can and must work on research towards developing such supercomputers,” Sinha said.
Telecom minister Kapil Sibal had last week written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking Rs. 4700 crore in the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17) for a project to build petaflop and exaflop speed supercomputers. A petaflop is a measure of computing speeds and an exaflop is 1000 petaflops. Sibal suggested, in his letter to the PM, that C-DAC be asked to build the new supercomputer. C-DAC had built India’s first supercomputer, the PARAM 8000 in 1991, and has since built several more advanced versions. But India’s fastest supercomputer at present has a maximum speed of just 0.3 petaflops – 3000 times less than an exaflop – and ranks 58 among the
world’s fastest machines . The world's fastest supercomputer is IBM's Sequoia which has a maximum speed of 16.32 petaflops.
Supercomputers, with their ultra fast processing speeds – equivalent to the combined speeds of thousands of PCs --help in key strategic projects including the N-program, defense projects, and tsunami and cyclone alert systems.
Like India, other major countries – like the US, Germany, China, Japan, the UK, France and Italy -- also have supercomputing programmes, and have been eying the prospect of exaflop speeds for the past few years.
In 2007, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) formed a group of experts to evaluate what it would take to build an exaflop speed supercomputer by 2015.
The group concluded that “the practical exaflops-class supercomputer DARPA was hoping for just wasn't going to be attainable by 2015. In fact, it might not be possible anytime in the foreseeable future,” team leader Peter Kogge wrote recently in a signed article
for the journal IEEE Spectrum .
The DARPA team set out with a goal to evolve a blueprint for an exaflop speed supercomputer that would consume 20MW – the most efficient power consumption they felt could be achieved. They concluded that the supercomputer – if built – would require at least 67 MW. Subsequent analysis has independently pegged a realistic power requirement at 500MW.
But even if Indian scientists could develop a 20MW supercomputer, it would consume 1728 million units of electricity (kWh) in a year – more than the electricity consumed annually by over 2 million Indians. The per capita annual consumption of electricity in India is 780 kWh.
Indian scientists however also cautioned that though exaflop scale supercomputers appear distant at present, the only way come close to building them is by investing in research now.
“They won’t get developed suddenly, overnight,” Sinha said. “Like all the other nations across the world, we too need to invest now in research so that we can evolve a way of building petaflop and then exaflop supercomputers a few years down the line.”
The date was previously stated 2017 but then backdated to 2019 then will keep backdate backdate backdate.... 
