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| SAGA-220 |
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has unveiled India’s supercomputer built in the labs of Vikram Sarabhai Space Center, Thiruvananthapuram. Computer named SAGA-220 is capable of a theoretical peak performance of 220 TeraFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second).The SAGA-220 is three times faster than Isro's previous fastest machine. And it is 1.5 times faster than Eka (Sanskrit for one) -- the previous fastest in India, made by the Tata Sons-owned Computational Research Laboratories in Pune.
=> How does Super Computer compare to a desktop or laptop?
A supercomputer is about speed. Its processing speed is measured in floating point operations per second (flops), or the number of calculations a supercomputer can perform in a second. For example, Isro's SAGA-220 logs in at 220 teraflops -- 10 followed by 12 zeroes. There are computers going into petaflops (15 zeroes) and the future is zetaflops (21 zeroes). To put this in perspective, the speed of a normal PC is 1 kiloflop (three zeroes).
On the same lines, supercomputers need enormous speeds to process and transfer data within its various parts. Most PC users Internet speeds of less than 1 Mbps. Banks and telecom companies use 4 Gbps lines to maintain ATM networks or billing systems. Supercomputers need speeds of 20 Gbps.
=> What kind of problems does Super Computer solve?
Anything that is calculation-intensive. Take oil exploration. It costs a company $10 million to $30 million to dig a well onshore and $100 million in the deep seas. After spending all this money, it could still not find any oil. So, before digging an oil well, geologists study an area and generate several million data points on metrics like temperature, density and pressure. Supercomputers can process this data for preliminary findings, helping companies decide whether and where to dig.
The utility of a supercomputer is endless. It can be used to forecast the weather (crunching 250 million data points every day); to simulate an aircraft wing's performance when flying over land, sea and ice-caps; to compute the structure and properties of chemical compounds during drug discovery; to do stress tests on a financial system; to find out the possibility of life on other planets.
Isro will primarily use SAGA-220 - an acronym for Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 teraflops -- for space research and rocket modelling.
=> When was the first supercomputer built?
In 1960, by Seymour Cray, an American electrical engineer, at Control Data Corporation (CDC). It was called the CDC 1604. Known as the 'father of supercomputing', Cray later founded his own company Cray Inc, which dominates the supercomputer market even today -- it has four supercomputers in the list of the world's 10 fastest. Today, companies like IBM and HP, as well as research institutes around the world, make supercomputers.
=> When was the first Super Computer built in India?
India's First Supercomputer was PARAM 8000. PARAM stood for Parallel Machine. The computer was developed by the government run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in 1991. The PARAM 8000 was introduced in 1991 with a rating of 1 Gigaflop (billion floating point operations per second).
All the chips and other elements that were used in making of PARAM were bought from the open domestic market. The various components developed and used in the PARAM series were Sun UltraSPARC II, later IBM POWER 4 processors, Ethernet, and the AIX Operating System. The major applications of PARAM Supercomputer are in long-range weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling.
All the chips and other elements that were used in making of PARAM were bought from the open domestic market. The various components developed and used in the PARAM series were Sun UltraSPARC II, later IBM POWER 4 processors, Ethernet, and the AIX Operating System. The major applications of PARAM Supercomputer are in long-range weather forecasting, remote sensing, drug design and molecular modelling.
=> Features of SAGA-220 :
- 220 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second (TeraFLOPS).
- Costed Rs. 14 crores. EKA has costed Tata Sons an approximate 320 crore rupees ($30 million).
- Built from commercially available hardware, open source software and in house development.
- 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPU’s supplied by Wipro
- Consumes only 150 Kw of power.
- Can be scaled up to many PetaFLOPS (1,000 TeraFLOPS).
=> Which country leads in supercomputers?
The US is the clear leader, accounting for 274 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. China comes second, with 41 supercomputers. India has 40 supercomputers. Of this, only 4 are in the top 500 list of fastest supercomputers, ranking India at number 15. This data is according to Top500.org, which ranks and details the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world. Started in 1993, the project updates its list of supercomputers twice a year: in June and November.
The pace of change can be gauged from the fact that Eka, made by the Tata Sons-owned lab, was among the world's top 10 when it was made in 2008. Today, it has slipped to number 47 in processing speed. Param -- India's first supercomputer, made by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Pune -- does not even figure in the top 500.
=> Which is the world's fastest supercomputer?
Tianhe-1A, owned by the National Supercomputing Centre, China. It has a hard-disk memory of 227,396 GB -- about 1,400 times that of the average desktop -- and uses 14,336 Intel Xeon processors.
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| Tianhe-1A |
Tianhe (or Milky Way), which cost $88 million, entails an annual running cost of $20 million and has a full-time staff of 200 engineers. It is used to solve to determine outcomes in oil exploration and aircraft simulation.
Despite its 220 TeraFLOPS speeds, SAGA would not even figure in the top 10 list of world’s supercomputers. It would be placed at 28th position if other countries haven’t yet built similar computers. If SAGA touches the 1000 TeraFLOPS peak performance it would immediately be positioned at 11th rank. Contrary to this – China has 2 Super Computers in Top 3 ranks!
Worlds fastest computer, Tianhe-1A has a peak performance of 2566 TeraFLOPS which is followed by Jaguar-Cray with 1759 TeraFLOPS. SAGA and EKA are the only two super computers which will be featured in the top 100 list of supercomputers. India needs more of these kind and probably some faster ones too.
Who told you that average desktop has a power of Kilo flops. Now a days, every desktop & laptop is rated in Giga Flops. Even, the cheapest 1st generation Intel core i3 laptop processor has a capacity of 17GF & Extreme end Core i7 has a rating of 184GF i.e. 0.2 Tera Flops.
ReplyDeleteThis is not the present scenario. In past, Pentium 4 was rated as 4 Giga Flops.
Again, for your information, Nvidia GTX 680, a recent relased super single graphics card as a processing power of 2800 Giga Flops i.e. 2.8 Tera Flops. It's cost is around 34,000 on Flipkart!
Again, it's previous version, GTX 580 has a capacity of 1.5 Tera Flops & cost around 26,000 at present & when you have written this article, it's price was around 29,000.
For your kind information, high-end & rich gamers which can afford lakhs of rupees to run Nvidia 3D surround technology actually implements the following:
1. Quad Nvidia top-end cards like 4 Nvidia GTX 580 (Previously) or Nvidia GTX 680 (Later part in this year)
2. Intel Xeon 6 core processors or Extreme End Intel Core i7
Overall from Graphics card, they are able to achieve 7 to 10 Tera Flops.
Not talking about others, I am myself using Dual GTX 580 to run three 3D monitors to play games in 3D surround mode i.e. personally, I can achieve over 4 Tera Flops by over clocking both CPU & GPU & this gaming PC had costed me around 98,000 rupees (Monitor not included).
CDAC & Indian government are full of craps! They cannot make create anything good. 320 crores for 220 Giga flops. IBM roadrunner 1400 Giga Flops for 600 crores.
At present, the cost of CPU is just 1.8$/Giga Flops i.e. around 100 rupees per Giga flops.
Even, for low-end Intel core i3 (2nd generation) 2100 series, computation power is 50 Giga flops & costs around 5500 rupees i.e. 110 rupees per Gigaflops.
So, where's the case of Kilo Flops lie??