TATAS’ SUPERCOMPUTER EKA TO FOCUS ON NEWER AREAS

Pune, July 27, 2008
The Hindu Business Line

Having achieved high speeds, Eka, the supercomputer designed by the Tata Group, is now expanding its focus on developing and delivering high performance applications for global customers in various areas that include weather modelling, aerospace, automotive engineering, drug design and nanotechnology.

S. Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL (Computational Research Laboratories), told newspersons that work was on to create meaningful applications that can solve tomorrow’s challenges in the areas of engineering, nanotechnology and drug design that are of interest to society, the country and global customers.

The performance has been upgraded from 117.9 teraflops to 132.8 teraflops through software enhancements and tuning, he said.

Eka would also enter the areas of seismic signal processing and animation and rendering, he said.

Eka is a Hewlett Packard based system with about 14,400 processors connected by a 45-km long cable. It can be scaled up horizontally or vertically and the patent for the design is expected to be filed soon.

Eka was developed with an investment of $30 million and is funded entirely by Tata Sons.