India this week committed Rs 10,000 crore ( 2.5 Billion$ ) to indigenously develop the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2017. The Planning Commission agreed in principle to provide the funds to the Indian Space Research Organsiation (ISRO) and Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Bangalore to develop a supercomputer with a performance of 132.8 exaflops (132 quintillion floating operations per second). A quintillion has 18 zeros (a million has six).
The world’s fastest supercomputer right now is a Chinese one, which can do 2.7 petaflops, or two quadrillion flops. A quadrillion has 15 zeros. India in 2007 had the world’s fourth fastest indigenously-developed supercomputer with a performance of 172.5 teraflops (172 trillion flops), which has been enhanced this month to 220 teraflops. That’s still a level lower than China’s supercomputer.
The Indian supercomputer will not be used only for enhancing the country’s space abilities, it will also be used to predict monsoon and precise weather inputs to boost agriculture N Balakrishnan, associate professor at IIS-Bangalore, said the target being set is “ambitious” while referring to achieving the exaflop – or next level of computing performance -- by 2017. “We have planned everything minutely.” “We have agreed to provide R10,000 crore for having ‘exa’ level of supercomputing facility,” minister of state for planning Ashwini Kumar told HT.
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http://www.hindustantimes.com/Rs-10-000-crore-push-for-India-s-supercomp-plan/Article1-703189.aspxI half expected this news from India as soon as I heard about China's Tianhe-1 becoming the world's fastest supercomputer last year. However I am rather surprised by the very high aim set for this one.
132 exaflop will be 50000 times more powerful than Tianhe. Furthermore the top 500 supercomputers in the world add up to only 32.4 petaflops.In 2010 Cray inc predicted that 1 exaflop might be possible by 2020, if India is able to do not just 1, but a 132 exaflop by 2017, as they claim...it would be a huge achievement.
On a related note, its assumed that a one zetaflop(1000 exaflop) supercomputer is needed to model the entire world's weather for 2 weeks accurately...and is not thought to be possible till 2030...if India is able to make good on its aims, then an zetaflop might materialize even earlier than thought possible.
I bet the new generation of NVIDIA processors might be used...or something similar. India is also developing its own operating system for its military/civilian research computers, known as of now as the Indian operating system. DRDO(defense research & development Organization) is supposedly developing this in order to get rid of the multitude of security flaws found in most of the commercial operating systems. This exaflop computer would be a big milestone in computing as well as a boon for researchers and scientists.
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