Tata’s supercomputer ‘Eka’ begins pilot work for commercial applications

According to sources close to the development, the main application areas are in aerospace and aerodynamics, automotive design and engineering, academics, animation, weather forecasting and so on, and CRL has teams are working on a library of software tools which will work with the application package to take it to the commercial stage. “CRL is working on several pilot projects. It is the question of the right application software being ported, tested and working on that hardware,” sources said. Although the company would use some of these application in house, be it for Tata Motors or Tata Elxsi, much of the revenues would flow in from outside the Tata Group, mostly from abroad.

In November last year, CRL has said that it had installed a HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system at Pune. This system was then integrated with CRL’s own innovative routing technology to achieve 117.9 TFlop/s (‘teraflops’ or trillions of calculations per second) performance, ranking fourth behind IBM’s BlueGene/L System in the US, IBNM’s BlueGene/P system in Germany and Silicon Graphics’ system in New Mexico.

CRL teams are working concurrently on both further making the system faster, while trying out several application areas. “There is a whole bunch of people working on specific application areas,” sources

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