Supercomputers: Who is in world's Top 10 list

BANGALORE, INDIA: The Indian Government is all set to build a supercomputer that will be 61 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer in the world by 2017.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is said to have already submitted a blueprint for the Rs. 4,700 crore project  However, five years is a long time for the country to make it to the top of the top ten league of fastest supercomputers of the world.

And, by then there are high chances that there will be more contenders for the fastest spot. However, the government is confident that its five-year project will be enough to build a range of supercomputers with processing speeds in petaflops and exaflops.

Flops or Floating Operations per seconds (Flops or Flop) determines the time used by a computer to make heavy calculations. A petaflop is a measure of computing speed and an exaflop is 1,000 petaflops.

As of 2012 it is IBM's Sequoia, which is the fastest and most energy efficient at 16.32 petaflops and 7890.0 kW respectively. That is, it has a peak speed of 16.32 petaflops and consumes nearly 7890.0 kW of electricity.

The Sequoia is currently being employed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under the Department of Energy for performing simulations of nuclear weapons testing

Until 2012, it was Fujitsu's K computer that was considered to be the fastest at 10.51 petaflops. It consists of 88,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, spans 864 server racks and consumes 12659.89 kW of power.

India, as a supercomputer maker, is yet to make it to the Top 10 Supercomputers of the World list. The fastest supercomputer of India, the latest in the Param series at CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation in Bangalore, ranks 58th in the Top 500 Supercomputers of the world.

As of June 2012, India has five systems on the Top500 list ranking 58, 86, 129, 224 and 380 Param 8000 is considered India's first supercomputer. It was built in 1990 by C-DAC.

Coming back to the top ten fastest supercomputers of the world, IBM's Mira BlueGene comes at third place at 8.16 petaflops and consumes 3945 kW of power. It is located in DOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory in USA.

Then comes IBM's SuperMUC system that has a peak speed at 3.18 petaflops and consumes 3422 kW of electricity. It is located at Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Germany.

China's Tianhe – 1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin comes at the fifth slot. It is capable of 2.56 petaflops and 4040 kW power efficiency.

China's Nebulae at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, fares at number 10. This system is capable of 1.27 petaflops and 2580 kW power efficiency.

IBM's Fermi BlueGene located at CINECA in Italy is the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world at 1.72 petaflops and 821.9 kW efficiency.

The eighth fastest supercomputer is IBM's JuQUEEN - BlueGene, located at Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany, at 1.38 petaflops and 657.5 kW.

France' Curie at 1.359 and 2251 kW is the ninth fastest supercomputer.