Bangalore: Six months after the Computational Research Laboratories, or CRL, in Pune unveiled its supercomputer EKA, which was ranked the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world and was hailed as much for its number-crunching speed as for its creator’s business model, the machine has begun testing applications for its customers.
The company expects revenue to start trickling in over the next three months.
“It won’t immediately be close to what we’ve invested ($30 million) in CRL, but we will justify the investment,” says N. Seetha Rama Krishna, head of operations at CRL, a fully owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd.
EKA and CRL mark a radical change in the world of high performance computing (HPC) which is largely known for its lack of economic traction and private investment. EKA is the only completely corporate-funded machine among the Top 10 supercomputers in the annual supercomputing (SC07) list announced in November in Nevada, US.
“We’ve been driven by the idea that supercomputing is also the differentiator for the nation’s economy and that it (supercomputing) can be a viable business,” says Krishna. So, following the tough HPC norms, where technologies become obsolete faster than applications get ported on them or businesses start kicking in, CRL is in talks with several customers who can validate their concepts on EKA.
“We want to prove to the world that it is not just a benchmark machine: It’s not only a racing car, if you wish you can convert (it) into a passenger vehicle,” says Krishna.
A unique model: Computational fluid dynamics model of the EKA data centre. EKA and CRL mark a radical change in the world of high performance computing (HPC) which is largely known for its lack of economic traction and private investment.
Another Tata group company (Tata Sons is the holding firm for the group), Tata Motors Ltd, recently challenged similar issues at the low-end of the car market when it unveiled the Nano for Rs1 lakh (approximately $2,500).
CRL’s customers range from companies engaged in businesses such as oil and gas exploration, life sciences, automobile and aerospace, re-launch vehicles, even media. Boeing Co. announced last week that it would run its high lift computational fluid dynamics program on EKA, which will model “high lift aerodynamic simulations in three dimensions”, something crucial for the design and development of aircraft wings.
The type of applications that EKA is testing in digital media—Maya, Material Studio, Abacus, Renderman, to name a few—proves that the zing in the Indian media market has not gone unnoticed by this research organization.