India in a supercomputing race
A computer system designed in India has made it into a top ten of the world's fastest supercomputers. The Indian system - known as EKA - made it into fourth place. It can now deliver a sustained performance of 478 trillion calculations per second (478 teraflops), nearly three times faster than any other machine on the list. Codenamed EKA - Sanskrit for number one is installed at the Computational Research Laboratories in Pune.
"The supercomputer system will be effective especially in the areas such as earthquake and Tsunami modeling, modeling of the economy and potential for drug design," said Mr. S. Ramadorai, chairman of the Computational Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of Indian firm Tata.
"While the ranking is important the more important thing is to keep on improving performance and applications," said Mr. Ramadorai. (BBCNEWS, Nov 13, 2007)