October was cruising toward its close. The clock was viciously steering toward the midnight stroke. Sweat-swathed eyebrows, nervous eyeballs, twitching palms, pounding heartbeats, crossed fingers, distraught glances, and agitated minds. The air was bubbling with tension, anticipation, fears, prayers, and tumultuous hope. An unknown campus in Punes Hinjewadi outskirts was literally a hairs distance from making history. It was nothing short in stature or excitement though. The 90% run of Indias supercomputer-in-making was successfully through, but the clincher was actually nowthe last 10% run-time. It might happen, it might not. Some kilometers away on his way and continuously on the phone, Dr N Seetha Ram Krishna, project manager, CRL and a key architect, understandably still kept arming his team against the Murphys ways, It may fail, be prepared for everything. As the reverse countdown began, every heart and hope in the jitter-packed room started racing high. Five, four, three, two, one and

Yes! The supercomputer hit the 117.9 teraflop mark. At about 11 pm on October 31, at a TAT facility in Punes Hinjewadi IT park outskirts at CRL, shrieks of joy, sighs of achievement, and euphoria was all that could be heard, seen and felt. Indias technological razor had made its sharpest cut again. The dream was finally alive. And one hour later when Dr Krishna looked around the same room he met another once-in-a-lifetime sight. Exhausted with 22 hours of grinding toil for the past six months and worn out of a peak of excitement and tension just some minutes back, everyone in the same room dozed off into a blithe and well-accomplished sleep. Thats a lifetime experience.

It surely was. India, through CRL (Computational Research Labs), a Tata Sons wholly owned subsidiary, had claimed its space in the world top 10 supercomputer league. The fourth in the global ranking and fastest in Asia. The 120 teraflop (sustained rating) supercomputer with a peak hit of 172 teraflop was actually a reality in October 2007, with the added pride of being the largest privately funded supercomputer in the world.

Eka Incubates
Tatas HPC (high performance computing) initiative dates back to June 2006 with the aim of becoming the one-stop-shop and achieving the iconic journey from atoms to applications. It armed CRL, its subsidiary, with the mandate of the Eka (Sanskrit for the number One) Dream. This seventy-five-member team, which was divided into hardware, system software and applications, had beyond the obvious challenge of achieving the supercomputing power as set, also the nigh-impossible goalpost of doing all that in flat six months. It had Dr Sunil Sherlekar, head, R&D, CRL, and also one of the founders who, with Dr Narendra Karmarkar, initially developed this concept, made the business plan and presented it to the Tata Sons Board to get the funding. Since then Dr Karmakar left and Dr Sherlekar stayed as the remaining founder.

Incidentally, Eka also claims the distinction of being the only supercomputer funded by a corporate. CRL had the task of fully integrating and designing Eka with an in-house developed technology.

The race flagged off. In June 2007, Hinjewadi (a 4,000 sq ft floor area set in record time) became the data center to house Eka. August saw the initial machines with 16 teraflop peaks and the first prototype going operational. September saw the building blocks being ordered, set in place in due time and October saw the 172 teraflop peak system operation. In six weeks record time, the actual 120 teraflop (or trillions of calculations per second performance) happened, and Eka was born.

Eka is built with 1,794 blade servers using common off-the-shelf hardware using quad-core Intel clovertown processors. It has 400 ton cooling capacity and 2.5 MW power requirement. Its benchmark is 117.9 teraflop, and achieved final performance of 120 teraflop on a sustained basis with 172 teraflop as the peak score. There are 28 terabytes of memory with a storage counterpart of 80 terabytes.

Page(s)   1  2