Sahasrat Installed at SERC is Fastest Supercomputer in India: Prof R Govindarajan

Earlier this year, IISc's Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) inaugurated the Cray XC40 petaflop supercomputer, christened as Sahasrat. The Centre acquired ‘Sahasrat’, a supercomputer for about Rs 33,000 crore, said Prof R Govindarajan, SERC, IISc.  Co-ordinating a session on ‘High Performance Computing and Big Data Analytics’, he said this is the fastest supercomputer in India, and IISc researchers use it for materials research, running climate models, data analytics of biological systems, and computational fluid dynamics.

Dr Michael L Norman of University of California, explained his group’s work in supercomputing. Speaking about big data, he said, “Big data is a commercial phenomenon. The scientific community has the opportunity to leverage some of the technologies behind the revolution”. Talking about IISc, he said, “IISc has spectacular atmosphere. I feel at home here”.

Dr Manish Gupta, Director, Xerox Research Centre India, in his talk explained how quality healthcare can be made accessible to all through the use of technology. Commenting on the rising cost of healthcare in India, he jokingly said, “ICUs in India have the most expensive beds in the country!”.

Dr Rajat Moona, Director General, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), and an IISc alumnus, spoke about how supercomputers have evolved in India, and also gave a broad picture of the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). NSM aims to drastically improve the number of supercomputers in India, and SERC, IISc is playing a major role in this initiative.

Prof Ram Akella, Director, Center for Knowledge, Information Systems, and Management of Technology, University of California Santa Cruz, and an IISc Alumnus spoke about how India and US could collaborate in the field of big data not only on academic problems, but also on problems relevant to society and commercial establishments.