Trend in super computers
December 2, 2006

On his visit to SPJIMR campus, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan shared his experiences in building the world's third fastest supercomputer, System X. Dr. Varadarajan is the Director, Centre for High-End Computing Systems (CHECS), Professor of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, USA and CTO and Co-Founder of Evergrid Inc.

In this talk, Dr. Varadarajan gave an insight about the entry barriers, production and marketing challenges faced while bringing to market a product (supercomp) whose life cycle is just 4-5 years and of which 5 units will be made. He also presented the motivation for System X, its architecture and the challenges faced in building, deploying and maintaining it.

Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, at the age of 31, was credited with building the world's third fastest supercomputer, from the ground up. His path breaking approach has given a new direction to the world of supercomputers and high performance computing. System X was conceived in March 2003 and had achieved a sustained performance of 10.28 Teraflops, making it the third fastest supercomputer in the world. Unlike other supercomputers, System X was built out of 1100 ordinary Apple Macintosh desktop computers wired together. This revolutionary approach made it possible to build supercomputers at a fraction of the prevailing cost.