May be 'coz lot of their money is riding on the commodities market...and supercomps do a good job of climatic predictions and cluster analysis. You get the drift..On 2nd December, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan shared with us his experiences in building the world's third fastest supercomputer, System X. Dr. Srinidhi 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 us 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 upgrades, user experiences, the challenges faced in building, deploying and maintaining a large-scale supercomputer, and his thoughts about trends in supercomputers and high performance computing.
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 at that time. 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.
Biography:
Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York, Stony Brook in 2000. He presently serves as the Director of the Centre for High-End Computing Systems at Virginia Tech and as an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Varadarajan is the recipient of the ComputerWorld Honors Award in the Science Category 2004, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the Egg Factory Technology Innovation award and a Faculty Fellow award from the College of Engineering, Virginia Tech. He was also honored by the MIT Technology Review in 2004 as one of the top 100 young innovators transforming technology. He is listed by HPCWire as one of the top 15 researchers worldwide in the area of supercomputing.
Dr. Varadarajan hails from Ahmedabad, where he did his schooling at St. Xaviers' Mirzapur. He then went on to receive his B.Tech in Computer Science at REC Warangal. He worked as a research assistant at IIM Ahmedabad with Prof. B. H. Jajoo during his school and college days.
Cheers,
Ganga
No comments:
Post a Comment