India's Fastest Supercomputer, Now Here: ISRO

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has readied what India can call the fastest supercomputer in its possession.

Supercomputer? Truly.. (Image courtesy: ibnlive.in.com)

Delivering 220 TeraFLOPS (220 Trillion Floating Point Operations per second), SAGA-220 is easily the fastest supercomputer we have around.

Built with a budget of Rs.14 crore, the SAGA-220 was just inaugurated by K V Radhakrishnan, Chairman, ISRO this morning. The supercomputer that was built by a bunch of scientists at the Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram will be roped in to solve complex aerospace problems.

SAGA, an acronym for Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture, as its name suggests imbibes the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). The scientists at the supercomputing facility used the available hardware, open source software components, and coupled it with their own expertise. Other components used include 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs manufactured by Wipro. Each of these 2070 GPUs and 400 CPUs would expectantly 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS, respectively.

The best part, however is the fact that this technology is environmentally green and its power consumption goes up only as much as 150 KW.