TATA Group builds Asia Pacific’s Largest Supercomputer based on HP Hardware

HP today announced a major milestone in world class supercomputing working collaboratively with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd, India’s largest conglomerate. This flagship win has resulted in CRL building the 4th most powerful supercomputer in the world which is also the most powerful in Asia and Asia-Pacific.

Just imagine what scientists and engineers could do if they had the ability to perform 120 trillion floating point operations per second. This is now a viable reality at India's Computational Research Laboratories, thanks to new HP High-end compute building blocks used by CRL to build their supercomputer this month.

HP has been working with CRL to evaluate and plan for an advanced HPC facility in India over the past year. This close partnership has now culminated in a vast computational capability - the most powerful in Asia Pacific and Japan - a top ranking entry into the TOP500 Supercomputer list, which catalogs the world's 500 most powerful installed technical and commercial computer systems. CRL will use the system to push scientific and industrial discovery to unprecedented limits. A case in point - engineers will now be able to model particle dynamics at ultra high resolution - allowing for significant breakthroughs in fields such as nano-photonics and medicine.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr. S Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL, said, “This project, based on standard infrastructure building blocks from HP, will herald the availability of affordable research in India. This will pave the way for growth in the Indian research industry by providing affordable access to computational infrastructure to the vast existing research talent pool across verticals and domains.”

Said Mr. Balu Doraisamy, Managing Director, HP India Sales, “HP is honored to partner with Tata CRL, a leading name in the field of High Performance Computing, from the inception stages of the project, all the way through its production. We are proud to work collaboratively with Tata CRL to take forward their vision of being a global leader in HPC, building scalable and cutting-edge supercomputer architectures while making affordable research in India a reality.”

HP's leading c-Class BladeSystem technology enabled CRL to put this supercomputer capability in place in a record one-month period. Less than twenty days after the first hardware arrived, the system was successfully running benchmarks at full scale and was turned over to early application users.

"HP Bladesystem technology tangibly shortened the physical installation and integration timeframe and got us into production incredibly fast," said Dr. Ashwini K. Nanda, CRL Program Manager. "HP’s unique differentiator here is the combined value proposition and affordability of leveraging standard building blocks to build a Supercomputer for a variety of applications so as to lower the cost of research and next-gen application building. We were able to get the fastest processors from Intel and the fastest interconnect from Voltaire & Mellanox, packaged in a dense, efficient and well managed environment from HP.”
Speaking on the occasion, Winston Prather, Vice President and General Manager, High Performance Computing, HP observed, "HP continues to see tremendous growth in high-performance computing, across the solution spectrum, and implementations such as the one at Tata CRL are evidence of how our hardware is making a difference in the way our customers leverage technology for better business outcomes.”
HP and CRL consider this system, named "Eka", which means the "one" in Sanskrit, a stepping-stone for CRL’s Petaflops Project. The groundwork has been laid in terms of advanced interconnects, on hybrid architectures, and algorithms and more milestones are on the anvil from the partnership between CRL and HP.
The CRL Project Joy - Eka 172 TF system in a nutshell
HP Unified Infrastructure including:

• BladeSystems c-Class c7000 enclosures

• HP ProLiant BL460c Server Blades
• Infiniband 4X DDR Mellanox Switch modules for HP c-Class BladeSystem
• Voltaire ISR2012 Infiniband 288 port 4X DDR switches
• 80 TeraBytes HP SFS20 Parallel File System Storage
• HP XC System Software
• Intel Compilers and Math Libraries

The Eka system is one of the first implementations on Fiber Optical Infiniband cables, which have proven very reliable at lengths greater than those generally achieved by copper alternatives.
The 2.5 MW of captive power being generated to keep the Eka system going was a catalyst for Computational Research Labs to create a new data center model for Dense Data Center Layout and Innovative Network Routing Technology that will see advances for HPC future products.

More information about HP high-performance computing is available at www.hp.com/go/hptc

About CRL
Computational Research Laboratories was incorporated as a fully-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons with a mandate to achieve global leadership in the area of high-performance computing systems. With an elite team of 50 researchers and scientists covering application software, system architecture, system software and hardware design --- CRL not only builds world-class and globally competitive supercomputer systems but also delivers application-level scalability.

About HP
HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $100.5 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended July 31, 2007.