A news item from Bangalore reports that India will soon be installing the country’s fastest supercomputer at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Center for Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation (CSIR C-MMACS). The facility was established in the late 1980s to provide a regional center for high-end scientific computation.
At 250 teraflops, the new supercomputer will be more than ten times as fast as the top system currently installed at CSIR C-MMACS, a 27-teraflop SGI Altix ICE machine, and nearly twice as fast as “EKA,” India’s current king of the supercomputing hill. The center has plans to upgrade the new system over the next few years, and is aiming at a future capacity in excess of 10 petaflops, 40 times faster than the original deployment.
The supercomputer will also be remotely accessible from any of the 40 current CSIR labs connected to the India’s National Knowledge Network. Researchers will be able to use the system to work on genomics, geoscience, computational fluid dynamics and applications for the development of new drugs and materials. Future plans include a datacenter at the C-MMACS facility in Belur, and a visualization hyperwall setup.
In the news report from Bangalore, Professor Seshu, who heads C-MMACS, explained the rationale for the new system. “Present high-fidelity computer simulations as well as the vast array of sensors spew out huge data (terabytes to petabytes),” said Seshu. “Thus, efficient data analytics and visualization tools immensely aid the researcher to infer knowledge from data.”
India currently has only two systems on the latest TOP500 list, both performing under 200 teraflops. That puts it behind 21 other countries on the list on the basis of peaks flops. India’s central government is looking to improve on those stats with a 6,000 crore ($1.2 billion) investment to “propel India into the elite supercomputing club”.
Takeaway
India’s five-year investment plan to improve their supercomputing capacity is recognition that the country must remain step up its HPC game if it wants to keep pace with other regions. Since the European have plans to double their high performance computing investment to 1.2 billion Euros/year and China is aggressively building out its HPC capacity and facilities, India has to increase its investments substantially if it wants to avoid falling further behind