HINDU group of publications

Mumbai/Chennai, Nov. 13 The Tata Group on Tuesday announced that its supercomputer Eka, which became operational this October, has been adjudged the world's fourth fastest.

This distinction was made at the International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking Storage and Analysis at Nevada, US.

The super machine, developed at Tata Group's Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in Pune, is the fastest computer in Asia and the first one developed using corporate funding, said Mr S. Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL, at a news conference in Mumbai.

Eka (Sanskrit word for number one), is a Hewlett-Packard based system with a performance of 117.9 teraflops. A teraflop equals a trillion calculations per second.

A supercomputer is the equivalent of 20,000 ordinary computers put together but the comparison stops with power. "It is like comparing an aeroplane and a bicycle," added Mr Ramadorai.

'Eka' was developed with an investment of $30 million (Rs 120 crore) in six weeks' time, funded entirely by Tata Sons.

TCS, Tata Technologies, Tata Strategic Management Group and other companies from the Tata stable have contributed to the project.

This computer will enable CRL to offer computing services in the field of weather forecasting, oil & gas exploration, drug discovery, gaming & animation and data mining, among others.

*The supercomputer is powered by a Linux open source operating system and it is based on standard hardware to address the issue of application scalability, which has been the bane of supercomputing till date. * The Tata Group now intends to market the supercomputers` capabilities to potential customers. "We are in active negotiations with government and private agencies," said Mr Ramadorai.

Group company Tata Elxsi and aircraft maker Boeing have been using the supercomputer on a pilot basis.

Commenting on potential models of doing business, Dr Sunil Sherlekar, Head, Embedded Innovation Labs, TCS, said: "We will be selling time to our customers to use these systems. Another model could be to build slightly smaller capacity systems for our clients on a turnkey basis."