THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Blink your eye and, gone. That’s how quickly supercomputers become obsolete. In 2011, when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) unveiled SAGA-220, its supercomputer in Thiruvananthapuram, it was the fastest in the country and 86th in the world. A mere five years down the line, it does not even find a mention in the latest TOP500 list.
But now, ISRO is aiming to bounce back with a brand new two petaflops machine which is expected to cost between Rs 100 crore and Rs 150 crore. “SAGA-220 is more or less obsolete. We are even finding it hard to get components for replacing parts. As we want the new 2 petaflops machine to be a ‘Make in India’ initiative, we have approached the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for assistance,” said Dr K Sivan, director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thumba. Petaflops denote dizzyingly high computational speeds. One petaflop is equal to a quadrillion (which is 1 followed by 15 zeros) floating point operations a second.
“Like SAGA-220, the new supercomputer also will be housed at the VSSC, but its services will be available to all ISRO centres, Sivan said. Unveiled by the then ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan in 2011 for computational fluid dynamics applications, SAGA-220 was capable of a theoretical peak of 220 TeraFLOPS, or 220 trillion floating point operations per second.