EKA
From PuneTech
EKA is a supercomputer built by Tata Group's Computational Research Laboratories (CRL). It was adjudged to be the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world, and the fastest in Asia, at the International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking Storage and Analysis at Nevada, US.
Eka (Sanskrit word for number one), is a Hewlett-Packard based system with 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector and is available for use on commercial terms.
TCS, Tata Technologies, Tata Strategic Management Group and other companies from the Tata stable have contributed to the project.
This computer will enable CRL to offer computing services in the field of weather forecasting, oil & gas exploration, drug discovery, gaming & animation and data mining, among others.
The supercomputer is powered by a Linux open source operating system and it is based on standard hardware to address the issue of application scalability, which has been the bane of supercomputing till date.
The Tata Group now intends to market the supercomputers` capabilities to potential customers. “We are in active negotiations with government and private agencies,” said Mr Ramadorai.
Group company Tata Elxsi and aircraft maker Boeing have been using the supercomputer on a pilot basis.
Yahoo has recently announced that it will use EKA for cloud computing research. In this context, EKA is expected to run the latest version of Hadoop and other state-of-the-art, open-source distributed computing software such as the Pig parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.
