Bangalore, Sep 13 (IANS) Wipro Infotech, the IT business division of the $3.4-billion Wipro Ltd, has become the first Indian tech firm to roll out supercomputers with super storage for the domestic market.
Christened Supernova, the supercomputers with teraflops and petabytes are custom built at the IT bellwether’s Puducherry manufacturing facility in partnership with ZResearch Inc., the California-based technology firm, specialising in making supercomputers and super storage worldwide.
One teraflop is equal to one trillion floating point operations per second.
“As a leading software and hardware major in the subcontinent, we are embarking on the next level of computing to meet the growing needs of research and development (R&D) institutions and enterprises across verticals,” Wipro Infotech vice-president Ashutosh Vaidya said late Wednesday at a preview of the product.
Scaling far beyond the conventional computing and storage infrastructure, the Supernova range of supercomputers in entry, mid-segment and high-end levels are configured to deliver from one trillion transactions per second to hundred thousand trillions of mathematical calculations per second, with their super storage capacity going up to hundreds of petabytes.
“Our supercomputers have been built to meet faster data crunching and storage needs of high-end scientific research labs in defence, space, geological surveys, engineering design, simulation and modelling, animation and bio-informatics.
“With India bracing up for the next wave of outsourcing and poised to emerge as the global R&D hub, our game plan is to fill the huge void for high-end computing power,” Vaidya pointed out.
Even as unstructured data and digital content continue to scale-up with a quantum jump, the amount of digital data created, captured and replicated were measured to be about 161,000 petabytes last year. At this amazing rate, the digital universe is set to grow up to one million petabytes by 2010.
“The Supernova’s clustered file storage deals with large amounts of unstructured data that has to be accessed by multiple clients at high throughput rates.
“Besides scaling seamlessly to several petabytes, the super storage comes with application specific adaptive inter-operable scheduling and has continues data protection,” ZResearch co-founder and chief technology officer Anand Babu noted.
Priced at Rs.2.5 million for the entry-level supercomputer with one teraflop computing power and four terabytes storage and Rs.10 million for the high-end version with four teraflops and multiple petabytes, Supernova is based on open source and architecture standard base product.
Claimed to be much cheaper than similar products churned out by global IT majors such as IBM and HP, Supernova is priced to be affordable, manageable and deployable for emerging players in digital media, banking, insurance and data centres.
“Increasing demand for higher computing power and mega storage by industry, academia and research organisations has made India a vital market for supercomputers and massive distributed clustered storage technology and solutions,” Babu added.