Advertisment

An 8-node supercomputer for Rs 4 lakh!

author-image
CIOL Bureau
New Update

Sudarshana Banerjee

NEW DELHI: An 8-node supercomputer traditionally costs crores. But a resident

of Dehradun, P K Roy, has developed two such 8-node supercomputers, which come

for just Rs 4 lakh each, roughly the price of four low-end branded notebooks, or

a second hand Maruti Esteem if you will! Roy is working at the Geodata

Processing and Interpretation Center of the ONGC.






The supercomputers are currently being used at the Indian school of Mines in
Dhanbad, and at the Earth Sciences department of IIT, Roorkee. The one at

Dhanbad is fully operational, the one at Roorkee needs some additional hardware

procurement. Both the systems can serve the purpose of Parallel and Distributed

Programming.






It may be recalled that the Commodity of the Shelf (COTS) supercomputers were
there since 1995 when an experimental Linux cluster (Wiglaf) was configured by

Donald Baker and Thomas Sterling at the Nasa Goddard SpaceFlight Center. India

could do with a couple of supercomputers in the areas of pollution dispersion,

software for global climate modeling, semiconductor modeling, petroleum

reservation simulation, etc.






Roy informed that a Fast Ethernet Switch based 8-node system, if configured
indigenously should not cost more than Rs 4 to Rs 5 lakh. Even an existing PC

LAN can be converted to a supercomputer with some straightforward efforts, he

adds.






"Once you have configured a 8-node system, configuring another <..<22>..>2
system is easy. I have plans of doing so. But right now, the performance

analysis of such systems is on my mind rather than configuring a 16-node system…

with CISC clock rates in excess of 1GHz becoming increasingly available with

peak performance greater than 1Gflops, radical developments resulting in

protocols like Myrinet and Infiniband and peer support from a strong

international community of high performance computing, the costly RISC computers

are rapidly diminishing into the past," informs Roy.







tech-news