EKA (supercomputer)

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EKA (the Sanskrit name for number one) is a supercomputer ranked as the 4th fastest in the world and is the fastest supercomputer in Asia, according to the Top 500 Supercomputer list announced at SC07, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis at Reno, Nevada, USA.

The supercomputer built at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) facility at Pune, India, marked a milestone in the Tata Group's effort to build an indigenous high-performance computing solution. CRL built the supercomputer facility using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by its scientists. It was reported to have cost $30 million dollars to build.^[1]

EKA uses nearly 1,800 computing nodes and has a peak performance of 170 Teraflops (tflops or trillion floating point operations per second) and a sustained performance of 120 teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the world-wide community to rank supercomputers based on performance.

EKA, the CRL supercomputer, follows a near-circular layout of the data centre unlike the traditional hot aisle and cold aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers, and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale. The CRL supercomputer has been built using CLOS architecture with off-the-shelf servers and Infiniband interconnect technologies with Linux as the operating system. This is the first ever site in the world which has used the dual data rate Infiniband with fibre-optic cable technology for superior performance.

In the near term, CRL is targeting and developing applications such as neural simulation, molecular simulation, computational fluid dynamics, crash simulation, and digital media animation and rendering. The long-term application areas would include financial modelling, seismic modelling, geophysical signal processing, weather prediction, medical imaging, nanotechnology, personalised drug discovery, real-time rendering, and virtual worlds among others. CRL also intends to offer high-performance and supercomputer system integration, research, applications and software services to its customers around the globe in the area of high-performance computing.