IIT Kanpur has launched its second supercomputer this week. The new supercomputer is the 5th best in India in terms of its performance and is the best 130th in the world’s top 500 supercomputers list, published in November 2013.
The computer was developed at IIT-Kanpur by a team lead by the institute's deputy director SC Srivastava. Ashish Dutta, head of the computer centre unveiled the computer stated that the new supercomputer would be used by the institute for education, research and training.
The new supercomputer will benefit IIT Kanpur's advanced aircraft design and scientific agri-forecasting projects. The computer was manufactured by HP and assembled and tested by a team of engineers headed by IITK’s deputy director SC Shrivastava..
Supercomputers are used in many areas of science and engineering research," said Dutta. "The general area of research that uses supercomputers is called high-performance computing (HPC). HPC can simulate nuclear explosions, evolution of galaxies, effects of pacemaker redesign, genetics and genetic related diseases, medical drug discovery, aircraft flight, aerodynamics, etc."
This is the second supercomputer by IIT-Kanpur. The institution’s previous HPC cluster was ranked 369 on the June 2010 TOP500 list.
“As load on this cluster grew, we decided to go in for a bigger machine,” explained Institute dean Manindra Agarwal.
PARAM Yuva II developed by the C-DAC is the fastest supercomputer in India and ranks ninth best in Asia Pacific Region and 44th in the world, according to the Green500 List, presented at the Supercomputing Conference (SC 2013) held at Denver, Colorado. IBM-developed Sequoia is the fastest supercomputer in the world and can process data at the speed of 16.32 petaflops.
Source: TOI