|
Dated December 19, 2002
The Economic Times
Supercomputing is finding
its way out of muted corridors of high-end research
labs into commercial and more lucrative alleys of the
business world.
Supercomputing or High
Performance Computing (HPC)
for intense scientific research which requires tremendous
processing power in terms of teraflops (a trillion floating
point operations per second) was meant earlier for research
in weather forecasting or computational atmospheric
sciences. To give an idea of what a teraflop can do
here's an example - seventeen teraflops are used for
modeling the Earth's atmosphere and ocean in a short
span of time.
Now, HPC is used in
large organizations like FedEx or pharma companies who
want to get their drugs into the market as fast as possible.
Says Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director of Centre for Development
of Advanced Computing (C-DAC),
Pune, "I am a firm believer in technology driving
the demand rather than demand driving technology. We
have technologies to do a number of things - it is just
that these technologies have to be suitably tweaked
to make them relevant to the masses. For instance, take
wireless technology - it has been around for quite sometime
but making it available in a manner (in a handset) which
the people would want to use, is what makes it hot."
There was so much of
an opposition when India's first supercomputer PARAM was developed. "A number of questions were asked
as to why were hundred of Crores of rupees were being
spent to develop this system, who would be the users
and so on. But what people don't realize is this: when
something like this is created, our thinking processes
are accelerated. Now, the PARAM which has been installed
in Russia is being used by scientists to simulate the
blood circulation in human body which would ultimately
lead to discovering the causes of cardiac ailments."
Reiterating this point,
Dr. David Kahaner, Founding Director, Asian Technology
Information Program, Japan, the number crunching ability
of supercomputers is moving onto even stock market analysis.
"Using this powerful processing power, stock analysts
are able to predict the movement of stocks in the capital
market," he added.
The HPC domain is no
longer dominated by mere theory and experiments. Commercial
projects like Supply Chain Management, Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP), Product Life Cycle Management (PLM)
and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are all using
supercomputing abilities to come out with applications
for the business environment.
"The buzz right
now is, however complex the task, it has to be completed
in record time and, there should be no room for error
too. For instance, in life sciences, for protein folding
, using petaflop machine which can handle 1000 trillion
operations per second can complete a part of the project
in one year. On a teraflop machine, it will take 1000
years and who is going to be there to use it if it takes
that a time, anyway," noted Dr. Tilak Agarwala,
Vice-President, Watson Research Centre, IBM, USA.
|