India ranks third in Asia as home to world's Top500 Supercomputers

The 42nd worldwide edition of the Top500 Supercomputers list released on Wednesday revealed that 12 Supercomputers ranked in the Top500 list are housed in India. [caption id=“attachment_1240751” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Getty Image.[/caption] Consequently, India is ranked third in Asia as home to the world’s Top500 Supercomputers with China taking the lead position with 65 Supercomputers and Japan at second place with 30 Supercomputers. Released biannually by Top500, the ranking has elevated India to the global map in High Performance Computing (HPC) technology which is applied in data intensive environments like weather forecasting and seismic analysis. In 2012, only 6 Supercomputers from India made it to the Top500 list. Tianhe-2 at the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, China is the meanest machine on the list with its speed touching 33862.7 Teraflops/second. For the uninitiated, the speed of supercomputers is measured and benchmarked in “FLOPS” (Floating Point Operations Per Second), and not in terms of MIPS, i.e. as “instructions per second”, as is the case with general purpose computers. A teraflop is equivalent to 10^12 flops. And that, is a fast computer. The top spot, as far as India is concerned, goes to the supercomputer housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. It ranks at number 44 in the global Top500 list. Others that made it to the list include the supercomputers at C-DAC, IIT-Kanpur and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre International Space Research Organisation among others. With a 100 percent jump YoY in the number of contenders in the Top500 list, India is well on its way to making a mark on the supercomputer scene. It has made major players sit up and take notice. For instance, IBM plans to introduce here its supercomputer Watson, which once famously defeated the human winners of the US game show Jeopardy. Globally, IBM has made a big push to commercialise Watson and apply its services to any industry, especially in areas such as retail, banking, insurance and telecommunications. An indigenous supercomputer 61 times faster than existing machines also might see the light of day by 2017, if claims are to be believed. View the full Top500 list here