Supercomputers have become a reality in India with Wipro Infotech launching Supernova, a range of supercomputers with superstorage capacity, in the country.
According to Wipro Vice-President (Personal Computing) Ashutosh Vaidya, the price of a fully-functional teraflop supercomputer is around Rs 25 lakh. One teraflop is equal to one trillion floating point operations per second.
“It will be affordable to huge segments of people,” Vaidya told reporters on Wednesday night. The company targets engineering colleges, institutions of higher learning and corporates undertaking “serious” R&D to sell the product.
“It’s difficult to put the number (addressable market in India). There will be explosive growth,” he added.
Wipro Infotech, a division of the USD-3.39-billion Wipro Ltd, is building Supernova grounds up in exclusive partnership with Z RESEARCH, Inc, a California-based organisation specialised in commoditising supercomputers and superstorage, with a development centre in Bangalore.
Supernova includes a range of supercomputers with an entry-level configuration delivering one trillion mathematical calculations per second going up to hundred thousand trillions calculations per second and superstorage scaling to multiple hundred petabytes.
“Supercomputers are no longer in the realm of science fiction in India,” said Anand Babu Periasamy, who co-founded Z RESEARCH in 2005.