Building the World's 4th Fastest Supercomputer

ngkabra writes "In November 2007, a previously unheard of supercomputer called EKA, built by CRL, India came out of nowhere to become the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world. It is also the only supercomputer in the top 10 that hasn't taken any government funding — which means it has no strings attached against commercial exploitation. That is one of the reasons why Yahoo! chose EKA for the cloud computing research that they announced at the Hadoop Summit earlier this week. Yesterday, I attended a presentation by the team that built EKA, and they touched upon a lot of the technical details of EKA, and the challenges faced in designing and building it, which makes for interesting reading."

This is old news

[Apoorv Khatreja]

I have known about EKA for years now. Being an Indian, I try to be aware of all the developments in IT in and around India, so I knew about this project when it was at it's earliest stages.

What most people don't know is that this project is funded by the Tata Group, and is directly influenced by TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), which I am strongly related to. The initial goal of this project was to surpass IBM's Blue Gene in the field of supercomputing, but then, things went wrong (as is usually the case with Indian projects), and it landed up in the 4th position, which I still feel, is quite a big feat for a projcet funded privately.

Re:Blue Gene has government funding?

[Anakron]

Blue Gene has government funding?

Err, yes? Blue Gene/L is situated *inside* the Lawrence Livermore national labs. I'm pretty sure the department of energy funds the entire project. IBM is the largest, but not the only technology partner in it.