K
computer- world's fastest supercomputer
Japan’s “K Computer“, which is being
jointly developed by RIKEN (a large natural sciences research institute in
Japan) and Fujitsu have taken the first place on the 37th TOP500 list of Super
Computers announced at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference
(ISC’11) held in Hamburg, Germany (June 2011).
SAGA-220 is a supercomputer built by the
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). As of May 2011, it is the fastest
supercomputer in the nation with a maximum theoretical speed of 220 Teraflops. The
name SAGA-220 stands for Supercomputer
for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 teraflops. It was unveiled on May
2, 2011 by Dr K Radhakrishnan, Chairman, ISRO.
Japan’s “K Computer“, which is being
jointly developed by RIKEN (a large natural sciences research institute in
Japan) and Fujitsu have taken the first place on the 37th TOP500 list of Super
Computers announced at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference
(ISC’11) held in Hamburg, Germany (June 2011).
It is named for the Japanese word
"kei”, meaning 10 quadrillion. This machine is currently installed at the
RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. The K computer is based on a ‘distributed
memory’ architecture, with over 80,000 computer nodes. In November 2011, K
became the first computer to top 10 petaflops. It is slated for completion in
June 2012.
SAGA-220- India’s fastest supercomputer
SAGA-220 is a supercomputer built by the
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). As of May 2011, it is the fastest
supercomputer in the nation with a maximum theoretical speed of 220 Teraflops. The
name SAGA-220 stands for Supercomputer
for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 teraflops. It was unveiled on May
2, 2011 by Dr K Radhakrishnan, Chairman, ISRO.
It is located at the supercomputing
facility named Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility at Vikram Sarabhai Space
Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram. The system is being used by scientists to
complex aeronautical problems. It has been hinted that it will be used to
design future space launch vehicles. The system is environmentally green and
consumes a power of only 150 KW. This system can also be easily scaled to many
PetaFLOPS (1000 TeraFLOPS).
The
fastest Indian computer so far has been the EKA at the Tata Sons’ Computational
Research Laboratory in Pune which ranks no 47 in the global TOP 500
Supercomputer rankings with a peak of 172.6 TFlops. The
SAGA-220 claim of 220 peak TFlops would probably be putting it around # 30 in the
global ranking.
