Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has unveiled India’s supercomputer built in the labs of Vikram Sarabhai Space Center, Thiruvananthapuram. Computer named SAGA-220 is capable of a theoretical peak performance of 220 TeraFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second).
SAGA displaces India’s existing supercomputer by Tata Sons called EKA which has a peak performance of 172.61 TeraFLOPS.
Noteworthy features of SAGA-220 :
- 220 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second (TeraFLOPS).
- Costed Rs. 14 crores. EKA has costed Tata Sons an approximate 320 crore rupees ($30 million).
- Built from commercially available hardware, open source software and in house development.
- 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPU’s supplied by Wipro
- Consumes only 150 Kw of power.
- Can be scaled up to many PetaFLOPS (1,000 TeraFLOPS).
Not fast enough
Despite its 220 TeraFLOPS speeds, SAGA would not even figure in the top 10 list of world’s supercomputers. It would be placed at 28th position if other countries haven’t yet built similar computers. If SAGA touches the 1000 TeraFLOPS peak performance it would immediately be positioned at 11th rank. Contrary to this – China has 2 Super Computers in Top 3 ranks!
Worlds fastest computer, Tianhe-1A has a peak performance of 2566 TeraFLOPS which is followed by Jaguar-Cray with 1759 TeraFLOPS. SAGA and EKA are the only two super computers which will be featured in the top 100 list of supercomputers. India needs more of these kind and probably some faster ones too.
[Post reproduced from our sister blog – The Gadget Fan]