Colloquia – High Power Computing & Its Importance in Business

Mrs. Radha Nandakumar

Date: 16 September, 2010

HIGH POWER COMPUTING & ITS IMPORTANCE IN BUSINESS

Radha Nandakumar informed the students about National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is a unit of University of Illinois, and the various activities that it is currently doing in the field of High Power Supercomputing. She started by describing the strategic directions that NCSA has endeavored in for the promulgation of high end computing activities. Some of these included Data Analytics, Scientific evaluation, Cyber education, Fellowships ( in collaboration with MIT). Apart from this NCSA is actively involved in academic and industrial interfaces. This has helped NCSA come up with some of the most revolutionary products like NCSA Telnet, Mosaic, NCSA image, PSP , ECID Cyberintegrator, MA Eviz, Petascale computing, and many more.

Talking about its industrial involvement she said,” The extent to which NCSA is involved in industrial interactions can be understood by the fact that more than one-third of FORTUNE-50 companies work with it”. NCSA has various companies in its credit. Most prominent of these include Apache, Linux and Telnet. It has been working with intellectual minds to come up with instrumental development in Extreme Computing. NCSA has collaborated with IBM in development of petascale computing.

One of the key findings of NCSA is the Council on Competitiveness which is a non-profit-organization for the creation of high value economic activity. It has been actively stretching its hands for implementation of various projects. It has provided its technological know-how to various Hollywood movies like TheCurious Case of Benjamin Button.

In later part of her talk she informed the students about how HPC is creating its impact in India. TCS has taken lead in HPC implementation. It surprised everyone by being 2nd worldwide in HPC. The Government of India is in process of implementing Garuda Grid Project that connects various schools and universities on high bandwidth network to facilitate videoconferencing. In future HPC is expected to play an important role in system application & software development, monsoon related data and business data, agricultural data and other precious data management.

She ended her interaction by citing a small poem “The university is a university
The world is a school.
Education is a bridge
Between eathhood and heavenhood.”
– Chancellor, Satya Sai University.