IISc's supercomputer SahasraT adds to Indian computing might

BENGALURU: India's most-powerful supercomputer is now housed in the city's Indian Institute of Science, strengthening the country's position in the global high-power computing race that is currently led by China.
On May 11, the IISc's Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) discreetly inaugurated the Cray XC40 petaflop supercomputer, christened as SahasraT.

“This unprecedentedly large, powerful computer gives our scientists the opportunity to do all the things they could not previously,“ IISc Director Anurag Kumar told ET.

SahasraT's computational abilities has been tested with promising results. An entire landing sequence of a high-lift wing was simulated using complex physics, and so was the overlap of supernovae forming a hot over pressured bubble.

“The system will help scientists in complex weatherclimate modelling, molecular and materials research and aerospace engineering. Every field has computational problems, so not a single field can be left out,“ Kumar said, adding that the SahasraT cost around $13 million (82.70 crore).

The SahasraT overtakes Aaditya at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, which was India's fastest supercomputer ranked 71 globally by Top500, an agency that ranks supercomputers.SahasraT clocks a total peak perfor mance of 1.46 petaflops, where one petaflop is 10 to the power of 15 mathematical computations per second.But with 33.86 petaflops, the world's fastest supercomputer is the Tianhe-2 at National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China.

“This is a huge improvement over our previous fastest supercomputer, which was the IBM BlueGeneL,“ said Adarsh Patil, a master's student at the IISc Department of Computer Science and Automation.

In March, the Centre launched the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) to connect academic and research institutions with a grid of over 70 high-performance computing facilities at an estimated cost of 4,500 crore. SahasraT has nothing do with the NSM that is yet to start and it is a part of SERC's own expansion, said aerospace engineering professor N Balakrishnan.

“Apart from investing in technology, India needs a broader, long term government-industry-academia initiative to develop human resource in the field of high performance computing,“ said Vishal Dhupar, managing director, South Asia at graphics technology company Nvidia.