BARC develops supercomputer

MUMBAI, JULY 4. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) has achieved a new milestone in developing a supercomputer 20-25 times faster than the fastest computer built by other institutes in the country.

The 84-node Anupam-Pentium supercomputer that can give a sustained speed of 15 giga floating point instructions per second (15,000 million flops), has been developed by the computer division of the BARC at a cost of about Rs. 80 lakhs. ``The 15 gigaflop supercomputer is five times faster than the BARC's 16- node Anupam-Pentium supercomputer which was developed in June last year,'' the chief of BARC's computer division, Mr. H.K. Kaura, told PTI.

``The present supercomputer has been configured using industry standard Pentium-III 600 MHZ personal computers,'' he said.

``The computational nodes of this supercomputer are interconnected using two networks - gigabit network for providing inter-node communication for supercomputing and 100 MBPs fast ethernet network for communication with the file servers,'' Mr. Kaura said.

Placed in a compact packing, the nodes and network switches are industry standardised and housed in a single large rack in such a manner as would enable easy upgradation with improved features in the future. The Anupam series of supercomputers are widely used by the BARC and other research institutions for solving various complex computational problems.

They find application in studies on molecular dynamics simulation, crystal structure analysis, gamma ray simulation by Monte Carlo method and laser-atom interaction computation, Mr. Kaura said.

``The current 84-node Anupam-Pentium supercomputer is almost 500 times faster than the first supercomputer that was built in 1991,'' he said.

- PTI

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