Chennai based IMSc's supercomputer - Kabru, has been officially recognised by the Top500 survey, at No.257.
But one of the surprises in the June 2004 Top 500, is `Kabru', the do-it-yourself cluster Linux supercomputer assembled at Chennai's Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), just two months ago. It has been ranked no. 257 with a maximum computational speed of 959 Giga FLOPS (or billion floating point operations per second) and a peak speed of 1382.4 GFLOPS. The peak speed is achieved when the machine is fully stretched, but this may not be sustainable for long. The peak speed makes this machine, a `teraflop' (trillions of operations per second) supercomputer.
There are 6 more India-based supercomputers in the Top 500 but unlike the IMSc machine, they have not been indigenously assembled, but are commercial machines imported from the U.S., and deployed by industry here. Beside Tech Pacific Exports and PCS Trading which have each, a HP Superdome and Geoscience which has deployed two IBM Blade Centers and an IBM xSeries, the other supercomputer being used in India is another IBM xSeries, credited to a "Semiconductor Company", and thought to be with Intel, Bangalore. The last is slightly faster than the `desi' machine at 1196.41 GFLOPS maximum.
Indigenously developed Param-Padma (C-DAC) has however been nudged off the list. The Hindu has this story.
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