BackTwo Indian supercomputers in world’s top 100 list
Eleven Indian machines have found a place in the latest list of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers
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New Delhi: Eleven Indian machines have found a place in the latest list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, including two in the top 100.
But India’s achievement pales when compared to the top country in terms of overall systems, the US, which has 233 on the list.
China, which ranks third, has 37 systems, and is also home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Tianhe-2. Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, is a system developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and is deployed in Guangzhou. It has retained its top rank for the fifth consecutive time and has a performance level of 33.86 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second).
The Chinese supercomputer is followed by Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is also the world’s most energy efficient supercomputer.
The only new entry in the top 10 is at No. 7—Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 system installed at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
India has made a minor improvement from nine supercomputers in the list released last year to 11 in the list released on Monday. The two new supercomputers include the one at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and the one at the National Centre for Medium Range Forecast in Noida.
The list is published twice a year by Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee who has been involved in the making of the list since 1993.
India’s position can be expected to improve as the cabinet in March approved the National Supercomputing Mission with an outlay of ₹ 4,500 crore over a period of seven years. The mission aims to set up a grid connecting 70 supercomputers located in research and development institutions, universities and the 1 million core cloud using the National Knowledge Network. The mission also aims to catalyze the government’s Digital India vision by making available huge data storage space and linking systems.
Some of the institutes with supercomputers that made it to the top 500 list are the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research and Indian Space Research Organisation.
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