IIT-Kanpur unveils its second supercomputer, makes global 500
04 Jun 2014
The Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur has unveiled its second supercomputer, which ranks fifth in India in terms of performance and is considered best for educational institutions.
Thes machine, assembled at the IIT-Kanpur after extensive testing by a team headed by the institute's deputy director S C Srivastava, was unveiled by him along with Ashish Dutta, head of the prestigious institution's computer centre, in Kanpur on Tuesday.
They said the supercomputer would be used for education, research and training. It has been ranked in the world's top 500 by www.top500.org.
"Supercomputers are used in many areas of science and engineering research. The general area of research that uses supercomputers is called High Performance Computing (HPC). This system can simulate nuclear explosions, evolution of galaxies, effects of pacemaker redesign, genetics and genetic related diseases, medical drug discovery, aircraft light, aerodynamics, etc," said Dutta.
He said that institute engineer Brajesh Pande had been the administrator of previous HPC machines and would also be the system administrator for the new cluster.
"The new supercomputer facility has come up at an approximate cost Rs48 crore," he said.
Institute dean Manindra Agarwal said the computer centre at IIT-Kanpur had a cluster (HPC2010 supercomputer) funded by DST that was ranked 369 in the Top500 list of a global rating company June 2010. "As load on this cluster grew, we decided to go in for a bigger machine. The new machine (HPC2013) has been ranked 130{+t}{+h} in the Top500 list of November 2013," said Agarwal.
HPC researchers from IIT-Delhi, IIT-Bombay, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, CDAC (Pune) and also from companies like Intel, HP, Altair, Mellanox, etc, attended the function.
