India gets another Supercomputer – Annapurna
The brilliant minds at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) in Chennai have developed India’s seventh fastest high-performance computation cluster. At an event at the institute, Annapurna was unveiled by Dr. Srikuma Banerjee (Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission).
With 1.5 Tera Byte memory and 30 TB storage cluster capacity the supercomputer is set to help researchers with computation and statistical analysis in fields such as condensed matter physics, lattice gauge theory, computational biology and complex systems research. The Annapurna cluster project is a Rs 6 crore ($1.3 million) investment which should bolster India’s research efforts. Annapurna boasts of some powerful technical specifications:
- 1024 cores – Intel Nehalem 2.93 GHz chips
- 1.5 tera byte memory
- 30 TB storage
At peak speeds of 12 teraflops Annapurna is ranked as the third fastest cluster among the broad-based scientific institutions in India after those at the IISc Bangalore and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. This is IMSc’s forth high performance computing cluster, the other three known as Kabru, Vindhya and Aravalli are still operational. The Garuda grid, India’s national computing grid that connects 45 institutes in India uses IMSc's Kabru.
Dr. Srikuma Banerjee, during the inauguration (pictured above, courtesy The Hindu) said that technological embargoes restricted development and different institutes were tasked with overcoming limitations on processors. US based Silicon Graphics International helped with Annapurna.