ISRO builds India's fastest supercomputer

Bangalore - ISRO has built a supercomputer, which is to be India's fastest in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 Trillion Floating Point Operations per second.

The supercomputer 'SAGA-220', built by the Satish Dhawan SupercomputingFacility located at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram at a cost of about Rs 14 crore was inaugurated by K Radhakrishnan, Chairman ISRO at VSSC today, ISRO said in a statement.

The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based supercomputer, 'SAGA-220' (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems.

'SAGA-220' is fully designed and built by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre using commercially available hardware, open source software components and in house developments.

The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied byWIPROwith a high speed interconnect.

With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS respectively, the theoretical peak performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS, the statement said.

The present GPU system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU based system in terms of cost, power and space requirements, it said.

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).

source: ET