EKA, fourth fastest Supercomputer in the world

Nov 14 : India is winning accolades one by one after Mukesh Ambani became the richest Indian, Tata group registered to have developed the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world and fastest in Asia.

The supercomputer is named EKA, which is coined from the Sanskrit word ‘Ekah’ that stands for one; it has been developed by Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons.

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This computer has managed to achieve speed of 117.9 trillion operations per second and it also became the first computer that has been developed without any government help.

S Ramadorai , Chairman and CEO of CRL said, “It is a team effort rather than an individual. This has put India on the world map and brought a national sense of pride”.

Now India has owned its second super computer ‘PARAM’ developed by C-DAC that is being used for weather prediction and rocket stimulation for loading satellites.

“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, enumerating the achievement of its completion in 20 months of time even after losing its technical leader Dr Narendra Karmakar in June.

Ratan Tata, Chairman of the Tata group said, “The Tata group has supported this development activity and is extremely proud of the team that has developed and built this supercomputer. I am sure, this supercomputer and its successor systems will make a major contribution to India's ongoing scientific and technological initiatives”.

This project is done with the help of global partners like Hawlett Packard, Intel and Mellanox but the intellectual property rights for its development would rest with the Tata group.

With the capacity of calculating ability of 20,000 personal computers, this ranking was announced in the international Conference of High performance at Reno, Nevada in the US.

The super computer, Blue Gene claimed the first spot with 478.2 Teraflops; it is jointly developed by IBM and the Department of energy at Livermore, California.

Eka can be used for drug discovery, weather and tsunami prediction, nanoscience and aerodynamic analysis, including aircraft modeling, and will reduce animal tests as it can stimulate the way a drug affects human organs or the system without actually conducting trials or even manufacturing the drugs.

CRL is also looking for new opportunity to provide aerospace application and is in touch with Airbus and Boeing. Its crash testing application has gained several interests from automobile company.

Eka has proved that India has talents to be nourished, which can make Indian flag fly high in the sky.