[India] Linux Supercomputer installed

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

The Hindu (25/04/2003)

 Linux Supercomputer installed

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE APRIL 24. The Supercomputing Education and Research Centre 
of the Indian Institute of Science here has commissioned what is 
arguably the most powerful single-platform Linux computing facility 
in the country: an Altix 3000 system from Silicon Graphics Systems 
India (SGI).

Powered by 32 Intel's Itanium-2 processors for high end 64-bit 
computing, the system is one of first high performance computing 
(HPC) platforms from a major global manufacturer to embrace the 
increasingly popular open source operating environment. The combo of 
the Linux software and the `big iron' number-crunching capability 
provided by Intel's top-of-the-line Itanium chips, has led to this 
machine being dubbed "Penguin on steroids,'' when it was first 
launched in the U.S. only weeks ago — a recognition of the increasing 
ubiquity of the Linux mascot, the penguin.

The acquisition of this machine by the nation's premier educational 
institution for supercomputing research is also reflective of the 
increasing inroads that Linux is making into challenging computing 
applications via the campus computing community route. "The machine 
provides the scalability, raw performance and reliability that high 
performance computing users need to solve large complex problems of 
both science and industry,'' SERC's Chairman, S. M. Rao, said on 
Wednesday at the inaugural function.

SGI's Managing Director in India, Prasad Medury, said the presently 
installed Itanium chips would be replaced with newer versions 
codenamed `Madison' by Intel, when they become available later in the 
year — a reflection of the truth behind media guru Marshal McLuhan's 
famous comment, about galloping technology: "If it works, it's 
obsolete.'' The replacements would improve performance by 30-40 per 
cent compared to the current processors, Dr Medury added. The system 
can also be expanded in the form of super clusters with up to 64 
processors per node — which may come in handy to address computation-
intensive tasks like gene mapping and bioinformatics which are part 
of SERC's agenda for the future.

Proof of the digital pudding

For the thousand-plus delegates — mostly young IT professionals — who 
attended the concluding day of the Intel Developer Forum here, the 
theory and practice of hi-tech were next door to each other.

After listening to the morning keynote from Chip Burczak, Intel's 
Director, Enterprise Platforms Group, describing in detail the 
features of the Itanium processor series for enterprise computing, 
they could walk across the road to the campus of the Supercomputing 
Education Research Centre and see a massive new machine with the same 
chips under the hood, being switched on for the first time: an SGI 
Altix 3000 supercomputer. Indeed SERC's Chairman was on hand in the 
morning session to describe how the chips in the new machine would 
beef up the Centre's computational muscle.

In other ways too, the occasion provided delegates with first -hand 
experience of emerging technologies in India. The organisers had 
placed half a dozen notebook PCs in the venue which visitors could 
use to get online without having to connect to a telephone or cable: 
the entire J.N. Tata auditorium had been converted into a giant 
'hotspot' where one could wirelessly connect to the Internet using 
the recently legalised WiFi technology.

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URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2003/04/25/stories/2003042502481600.htm