If India’s current Union Minister for Telecommunications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal has his way, India could boast of having the worlds’s fastest Supercomputer by the year 2017. India’s current fastest supercomputer can be spotted at the CSIR (Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation) in Bangalore and is capable of delivering up to 303.9 teraflops of performance. It is ranked 58th amongst the top 500 Supercomputers of the world.
Now, if you are sort of new to all this supercomputer terminology, let me first begin with informing you that the performance of a supercomputer is measured in FLOPS. FLOPS stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second.
The current leader of the supercomputer pack is IBM’s Sequoia BlueGene/Q housed at Livermore United States. This system is capable of a peak performance of 16.3 petaflops. As for this new proposed Supercomputer, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has been entrusted to develop the same. The CDAC has on earlier occasions, boasted of housing the erstwhile fastest supercomputers of India – the famous PARAM series. It is still not clear as to what purpose this new supercomputer would be designed for.
Another thing to be noticed is the fact that many others too are already in the race to best the Sequoia and 2017 is still a long time away. Only time would tell if India actually manages to do that.
