The Hindu Business Line : Tatas’ supercomputer Eka to focus on newer areas

Pune, July 26 Having achieved high speeds, Eka, the supercomputer designed by the Tata Group, is now expanding its focus on developing and delivering high performance applications for global customers in various areas that include weather modelling, aerospace, automotive engineering, drug design and nanotechnology.

Mr S. Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL (Computational Research Laboratories), told newspersons that work was on to create meaningful applications that can solve tomorrow’s challenges in the areas of engineering, nanotechnology and drug design that are of interest to society, the country and global customers.

Performance

The performance has been upgraded from 117.9 teraflops to 132.8 teraflops through software enhancements and tuning, he said.

Eka would also enter the areas of seismic signal processing and animation and rendering, he said.

Patent soon

Eka is a Hewlett Packard based system with about 14,400 processors connected by a 45-km long cable. It can be scaled up horizontally or vertically and the patent for the design is expected to be filed soon.

Eka was developed with an investment of $30 million and is funded entirely by Tata Sons.

Simulation

Dr Sunil Sherlekar, Head, Embedded Innovation Labs, TCS, said the virtual simulation applications on Eka using CFD (computational fluid dynamics) could help address the limitations of a testing environment in the study of aerodynamic abilities of aeroplanes and automobiles. He said the system was being readied for simulating an entire aircraft using multi-physics modelling and co-simulation of fluid dynamics, aero-acoustics, control systems and structural mechanics.

In the automotive sector, the simulation of non-linear structural mechanics was needed to evaluate the behaviour of cars during collision by creating virtual crash simulations that map out the impact on car bodies, he said.

Using Eka, CRL has carried out detailed CFD for sedan cars and Formula 1 racing cars with results that closely matched real experiments, he said. The system would be used in the future for detailed CFD simulation for all types of cars and crash simulation.

In the area of weather modelling, a public-domain software had been able to simulate the deluge that occurred in Mumbai two years ago.

Work is on to refine the weather prediction models, including cloud formation and effects of the ocean.

He said the behaviour of gold nano-particles had been simulated and packages would be developed that can simulate the properties of any nanostructure given its chemical composition, molecular structure and shape, as well as simulate any self-assembly process given its parameters.

In drug discovery, he said CRL is designing a drug insilico for an ailment that is fairly common among the aged.

He said the collaborator had a list of 10,000 molecules which are potential drugs for the disease; each drug was simulated on Eka and the target receptor, and there were attempts to shortlist about 100 molecules for subsequent ‘wet lab’ experiment.

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