Thursday, 13 September 2007

Wipro Infotech Launches Supercomputers

Wipro Infotech became the first company outside of Government to develop and launch a range of supercomputers in India. Wipro has named the computer Supernova.

Wipro partnered with California based Z Research to launch the super computers. Z Research has commoditised supercomputers and superstorage.

In India, the Government owned C-DAC has the expertise to build supercomputers. India’s supercomputer initiative started when the American government barred Cray Computers of USA from selling supercomputers to India.

The entry-level Supernova has a configuration of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second.
Wipro said the fastest of them can deliver up to hundred thousand trillions of calculations per second. The Superstorage can hold hundreds of Petabytes of data.

Wipro has targeted the computers at engineering colleges, technical training institutes, design start-ups, corporate research labs and media houses. To begin with, says Ashutosh Vaidya, Vice President, Wipro Personal Computing, the computers will be sold only in India and later depending on demand, will start selling it abroad.

The company’s first product-Thunder- is priced at Rs. 25 lakhs (Rs. 2.5 million). Thunder currently ranks 19 in the list of top 500 supercomputers in the world. Thunder is an open source supercomputer comprising a cluster of 4096 Intel Itanium2 processors with an output of 20 teraflops.

“India is a vital market for us and we are excited to bring supercomputing and massive distributed clustered storage technology and solutions to India by partnering with Wipro. We trust Wipro for its strength in product knowledge, deployment capabilities and support framework in Indian market, while we bring in our domain expertise which has been distilled from years of experience and deployments worldwide at National Laboratories and Fortune 1000 companies,” said Anand Babu, Co-Founder of Z Research.