Computz....Time to Change

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has just built a new supercomputer, one that is said to be the fastest in the country, with a theoretical peak performance of up to 220 TeraFLOPS. Called SAGA-220 (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS), the supercomputer is located in Thiruvananthapuram, at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), which houses the Satish Dhawan Supercomputing Facility. A GPU-based supercomputer, SAGA-220 stands for Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS. It is made up of 400 Nvidia Tesla 2070 workstation GPUs, and 400 Intel Xeon quad-core CPUs. The parts were supplied by Wipro, and utilise a high-speed interconnect between the components. The total cost of the system was about 14 crores, and, is apparently environmentally green, with a power consumption of about 150KW. According to the team at ISRO, the system is also very scalable, and can be made to achieve up to several PetaFLOPS. The

Researchers have unveiled a tiny new stamp size chip that delivers supercomputer performance using a process that mimics functions of the human brain. The "neurosynaptic" chip could open a wide new range of computing possibilities from artificial intelligence systems, self driven cars and more. The chip has been developed by researchers at IBM, Cornell Tech and iniLabs. It is a new approach in design and a significant step up from the system when it was first announced two years back. Researchers claim that the technology will lead to a future of compact cognitive computing. The Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics or SyNAPSE chip, is capable of 256 million programmable synapses, 1 million programmable neurons and 46 billion synaptic operations per watt, per second. The new chip dubbed "TrueNorth" works to mimic the "right brain" functions of sensory processing "responding to sights, smells and information from the envi