Bangalore has once again re-instated the popular notion of being the technology hub of the country. The city has the maximum of the top supercomputers in India, including the third fastest.

The latest ranking by Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) shows that Bangalore has five of India’s top 15 supercomputers, the rest of them are scattered all across India. Pune and Chennai follow Bangalore with three supercomputers each, while Delhi boasts of two supercomputers and Mumbai and Hyderabad claim one each. However, in terms of speed, Pune has the two fastest supercomputers in India, HP supercomputer at Computational Research Laboratory and Param supercomputer at C-DAC. At the third spot is IISc’s IBM Blue Gene supercomputer in Bangalore. Blue Gene is followed by HP Proliant at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research and SGI Altix at CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation.

The procedures for submission of supercomputers and verification in India are similar to the ones needed for the ‘Top 500’ list of supercomputers globally. The evaluation procedure is the same as in Top 500 projects, in which the best performance on the LINPAC (software) benchmark is used as the measure for ranking every supercomputer. The performance criterion for ranking is a minimum of 1.71 TFlops. The new average performance is 16.49 TFlops, while the combined performance is 247.28 TFlops. The three fastest supercomputers in India are on the Top 500 list in the world, thanks to talented scientists.

Scientists say the ‘Top supercomputers-India’ list can help Indian installation sites or institutes compare the capabilities of supercomputers. “The project is meant to create and promote healthy competition among supercomputing initiatives, and can lead to significant advancement in this area,” a scientist said.