THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Once ranked among the top 100, SAGA-220, ISRO’s supercomputer at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) Thumba, has been pushed to the 422nd place in the world rankings and 10th in the country. In the 2012 rankings, it was listed 86th by Top500 and number one in India.
Top500, which ranks supercomputers across the globe twice a year, published its first list for 2015 recently. Ten supercomputers in the country have made it into the June 2015 list which is topped by Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2) of China, which has retained its crown for the fifth time.
The top supercomputer from India is the Cray system at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which is ranked 79th. The supercomputer at the Indian Institute of Tropical meteorology is second in the country and ranked 96th in the Top500. Third and fourth Indian positions have gone to the supercomputer at the Indian Lattice Gauge Theory Initiative (114th in Top500), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Param Yuva II at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (172nd). VSSC director K Sivan said ISRO would boost SAGA-220’s capabilities in the near future. “We have plans to upgrade its capacity. We use it for advanced computational fluid dynamics studies for the launch vehicle programme,” Sivan said. In the June 2014 rankings, SAGA-220 was listed 279th, and in November 2014 at 346th.