The Hindu : Linux Supercomputer installed

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 25, 2003

Business

Business

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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