EKA (supercomputer)

EKA (abbreviation of Embedded Karmarkar Algorithm, also means the number One in Sanskrit^[6]), is a supercomputer built by the Computational Research Laboratories, a company founded by Dr. Narendra Karmarkar, for scaling up a supercomputer architecture he designed at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research with a group of his students and project assistants over a period of 6 years.

EKA

Active	October 2007[1]
Operators	Computational Research Laboratories, Tata Sons
Location	Computational Research Laboratories, Pune, India
Memory	28.7 TeraByte[2]
Storage	40 TeraByte[2]
Speed	172.6 TeraFLOPS[3]
Cost	US$30,000,000 INR 1,800,000,000 (assuming US$1 = 60 INR)[4]
Ranking	14 November 2007
Purpose	Multipurpose[5]

CRL became a subsidiary of Tata Sons after their investment into the company. The hardware platform required for initial software development was built with technical assistance from Hewlett-Packard.^[5]

Design

To enable design of new software, a previously proven hardware platform was needed. This was provided in the EKA system using 14,352^[2] cores based on the Intel QuadCore Xeon processors. The primary interconnect is Infiband 4x DDR. EKA occupies about 4,000-square-foot (370 m²) area.^[7] It was built using offshelf components from Hewlett-Packard, Mellanox and Voltaire Limited.^[2] It was built within a short period of 6 weeks.^[8]

Ranking history

At the time of its unveiling, it was the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world and the fastest in Asia.^[7]

See also

• SAGA-220, a 220-TeraFLOPS supercomputer built by ISRO
• PARAM series of supercomputers by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing
• Supercomputing in India