The supercomputer commodity

Two decades ago, Indias Mausam Bhawan installed its first supercomputer. The Cray X-MP/14 was a giant, and symbolic of the times: proprietary design, own processors, specialized OS. The X-MP/14 crossed a GFLOPS, or a billion floating point operations per second, and cost tens of crores.

Seymour Cray was an icon: he had designed the first supercomputers in the 1960s at Control Data Corp, and CDC led the market until Cray left to form his own company. Cray Research held the top spot in supercomputing in the 1980s.

A decade later, Indias C-DAC had developed over 30 supercomputers in its Param series, and exported some to Russia, Germany and Canada. By 1998 the Params were crossing 10 GFLOPS, with an open frame design using standard chips and components from the market. By 2003, C-DACs Param Padma had touched 1 TFLOPS, or 1,000 GFLOPS, using a cluster of computers (with 250 processors) running Linux.

The point is neither about the pace of progress, nor about Indias achievements in supercomputing. The first is a given: yesterdays supercomputer is beaten by todays laptop. A cheap quad-core 2.66GHz Xeon workstation outperforms a multimillion-dollar Cray C90 from early 1990s. And with C-DAC fading from the supercomputing picture, India doesnt feature in the Top500 Supercomputers list. Eight of the Top 500 supercomputers are located in India, but none is Indian-made. Six are IBM, the other two HP. (There are 13 supercomputers in China, 24 in Japan, and 282 in the US).

The point is that supercomputers are no longer proprietary giants with exclusive processors and operating systems. Theyre standard, usually clusters of nodes made from off-the-shelf equipment.

In 2004, a young 1999 graduate from Annamalai, Tamil Nadu, then working for California Digitala US-based company owned by an Indianbuilt the worlds second-fastest computer, Thunder, with 4,096 64-bit Itanium2 processors and 8 TB of RAM, running Linux. Anand Babu released the software into the public domain, under GNU GPL. He says that the community now contributes a great deal, speeding up progress and lowering cost. (Thunder, at the USAs Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is still #34 on the Top500 list.).

Babu then co-founded Z Research in 2005, architecting a cluster filesystem and supercomputing stack, and again put that into the public domain. This softwares the basis for supercomputers now sold by Wipro, built with a cluster of standard Xeon-based servers. That brings a teraflop supercomputer to the Rs 25 lakh level, such as a recent installation at Ahmedabads Institute of Plasma Research. Similar performance from other vendors can cost over four times as much.

For the record, the Top500 supercomputers include 374 clusters. And 389 systems run some variant of Linux.