Bangalore is the supercomputer capital of India. The new list released by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in December 2013 revealed that Bangalore has seven supercomputers, pipping Pune that has six.
Bangalore has beaten and Chennai with both cities having just one and two top supercomputers respectively. It even beaten Delhi, which has four if Noida is taken as part of the Delhi region. Hyderabad is doing well, having four supercomputers in the top-33 list.
The performance criterion for drawing the list is a minimum of 10 teraflops performance.The combined supercomputing of the country is now 2.97 petaflops, whereas the average performance in the list is about 90 teraflops.
The first seven supercomputers also figure in the world top 500 supercomputers’ list. The most powerful supercomputer is at Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, and the second most powerful supercomputer is also at Pune’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Bangalore now has the third fastest supercomputer in the country at the CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute (CSIR-4PI), a HP machine which performs at 362.09 teraflops.
The IISc has three IBM supercomputers – at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and another at the Department of Physics, the Supercomputer Education and Research. Bangalore’s Aeronautical Development Agency too has two HP supercomputers, while the CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute has one more other than the one in Top 10.
Scientists at the IISc state that the supercomputers serve in different domains – making minute calculations in biology ,analysing and predicting weather and climate, mathematics, aerospace, meteorology chemistry, oceanography, and defence.
In order to in achieve accuracy in developing a fighter aircraft or to understand why the cellular pathways in the body are blocked, it required innumerable calculations – such complex fields require very high supercomputing powers that would save time and energy, and effectively enhance the speed of research projects.
Bangalore is now known as IT city. However, for decades it has been known as India’s science city, though Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi come close to claiming that status, as they too have excellent science institutions. Bangalore has a minimum of 10 science centres of research and specialised institutes that explains the high number of supercomputers in the City.
Prof C N R Rao recently declared that three more supercomputers would be coming to Bangalore under a new policy to further push up India’s supercomputing power. India’s supercomputers must be as robust as China’s for India to be taken more seriously in computing domain on the world stage,s aid Rao.
Work in Bangalore has begun and it has been decided to place the new supercomputer at the IISc.The country is spending Rs 10,000 crore to set up next generation supercomputers in Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad.