“SAGA-220

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced building of India’s fastest supercomputer with a peak performance of 220 teraflops (220 trillion floating-point operations per second).

The new graphic processing unit (GPU)-based supercomputer named “SAGA-220” (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 teraflops) is for use by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems. ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, inaugurated the supercomputer.

SAGA-220 has been fully designed and built at the VSSC using commercially available hardware, open source software components and in-house research. The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by the software major Wipro. With each GPU providing a performance of 500 gigaflops and each CPU 50 gigaflops, the theoretical peak performance of the system amounts to 220 teraflops.

The GPU system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU-based system in terms of cost, power and space requirements. The cost of the supercomputer is about Rs 14 crore. The system uses an environment friendly technology and consumes only 150 kW of power. The system can also be scaled up to petaflops (one petaflop is equivalent to 1,000 teraflops).

The supercomputer is 1.5 times more powerful than India’s fastest computer now and three times faster than ISRO’s current supercomputing capability. 

For Wipro, its collaboration with ISRO for building the supercomputer will underscore the capability of its Supernova range of supercomputers, offered in a partnership with US-based Z Research Inc. The company is said to be aiming to build a capability of up to 500 teraflops for ISRO.

Earlier, the fastest supercomputer in India, at 132.8 teraflops, was Eka, located at the Computational Research Laboratories Limited (CRL), a subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, at Pune.