India Creates World’s Fourth Fastest Supercomputer

The twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers shows five new entrants in the Top 10, which includes sites in the United States, Germany, India and Sweden. For the first time ever, India placed a system in the Top 10!

The 30th edition of the TOP500 list was released on November 12, 2007 at SC07, the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, in Reno, Nevada. The fastest supercomputer in the world is BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. – a rank it has occupied since November 2004.

The Indian entry at #4 was a surprise -The Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved 117.9 TFlop/s performance.

So you thought Tata only dealt with steel, automobiles, mobile services and salt! Now that should give Indian IT industry some more computing exposure…