The Hindu News Update Service News Update Service Friday, September 14, 2007 : 0300 Hrs Sci. & Tech. Supercomputer becomes reality in India
Bangalore, Sept. 14 (PTI): Supercomputers have become a reality in India with Wipro Infotech launching Supernova, a range of supercomputers with superstorage capacity, in the country. According to Wipro Vice-President (Personal Computing) Ashutosh Vaidya, the price of a fully-functional teraflop supercomputer is around Rs 25 lakh. One teraflop is equal to one trillion floating point operations per second. "It will be affordable to huge segments of people," Vaidya told reporters Wednesday night. The company targets engineering colleges, institutions of higher learning and corporates undertaking "serious" R&D to sell the product. "It's difficult to put the number (addressable market in India). There will be explosive growth," he added. Wipro Infotech, a division of the USD-3.39-billion Wipro Ltd, is building Supernova grounds up in exclusive partnership with Z RESEARCH, Inc, a California-based organisation specialised in commoditising supercomputers and superstorage, with a development centre here. Supernova includes a range of supercomputers with an entry-level configuration delivering one trillion mathematical calculations per second going up to hundred thousand trillions calculations per second and superstorage scaling to multiple hundred petabytes. "Supercomputers are no longer in the realm of science fiction in India," said Anand Babu Periasamy, who co-founded Z RESEARCH in 2005. "We have made it affordable," added Periasamy, who as Chief Technology Officer architected the GlusterFS cluster file system and GlusterHPC supercomputing/HPC stack. Bangalore-headquartered Wipro said Supernova promised to meet faster data crunching and storage needs of high-end scientific research labs in defence, geological surveys, biotechnology, animation and other high end design space. Wipro officials said with India geared to witness the next big bang in outsourcing as the R&D centre of the world, there's a huge vacuum created with an urgent need for high-end supercomputing. "Supernova is an answer to that market need," Vaidya said. "Our unique selling proposition is affordability." Key features of Supernova supercomputers include seamless scalability from one teroflop to hundreds of petaflops. It's based on open source, a standards-based product, not proprietary. Officials said Wipro Supernova superstorage is a non-stop high availability storage, delivering massive capacity. "India is a vital market for us," said Periasamy. "We are excited to bring supercomputing and Massive Distributed Clustered Storage technology and solutions to India by partnering Wipro." He added: "We trust Wipro for their strength in product knowledge, deployment capabilities and support framework in Indian market, while we bring in our domain expertise which has been distilled from years of experience and deployments worldwide at renowned To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
