Indian space agency builds super computer

Thiruvananthapuram, May 3 (PTI) Indian space agency ISRO
has developed a supercomputer, which is to be the country's
fastest, at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) here in the
south Indian state of Kerala.
The new computer, titled 'SAGA-220', can theoretically
perform 220 TeraFLOPS (220 Trillion Floating Point Operations
per second), experts said.
It was built by the Satish Dhawan Supercomputing
facility, located at the VSSC campus here at a cost of about
Rs 14 crore, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) sources
said.
The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based
supercomputer, "SAGA-220" (Supercomputer for Aerospace with
GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space
scientists for solving complex aerospace problems.
"SAGA-220" is fully designed and built by Vikram Sarabhai
Space Centre using commercially available hardware, open
source software components and in house developments.
The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel
Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by WIPRO with a high speed
interconnect.
With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500
GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS respectively, the theoretical peak
performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS, the
statement said.
The present GPU system offers significant advantage over
the conventional CPU based system in terms of cost, power and
space requirements, it said.
The system is environmentally green and consumes a power
of only 150 KW. This system can also be easily scaled to many
PetaFLOPS (1000 TeraFLOPS).