The Indian Institute Of Technology at Kanpur (IIT-K) unveiled a new supercomputer yesterday – India’s fifth fastest and a premier resource for this educational institution. Ashish Dutta, head of the Computer Centre, revealed that IIT-K spent about Rs. 48 crore (US$8 million) in acquiring the machine, which will be used for research, education and training purposes.
“Supercomputers are used in many areas of science and engineering research,” said Dutta in reference to the new system. “HPC can simulate nuclear explosions, evolution of galaxies, effects of pacemaker redesign, genetics and genetic related diseases, medical drug discovery, aircraft light, aerodynamics, etc.”
Among the projects already slated to benefit from the increased computational power are advanced aircraft design and scientific agri-forecasting.
The computer was manufactured by Hewlett-Packard and assembled and tested by a team of engineers headed by IITK’s deputy director SC Shrivastava. With a LINPACK performance measured at 282 teraflops, the supercomputer earned a 130th ranking on the most recent edition of the TOP500 list, published in November 2013.
This marks the second supercomputer for IIT-Kanpur. The institution’s previous HPC cluster, also an HP system, was ranked 369 on the June 2010 TOP500 list.
“As load on this cluster grew, we decided to go in for a bigger machine,” explained Institute dean Manindra Agarwal.