Indian origin scientist's supercomputer can perform 28.16 trillion calculations per second

Washington, August 22 (ANI): A scientist of Indian origin has created a new supercomputer, called Cystorm, which can carry out 28.16 trillion calculations per second.

Cystorm, a Sun Microsystems machine, was developed by Srinivas Aluru from the Iowa State University.

The 3,200 computer processor cores that power Cystorm makes it perform 28.16 trillion calculations per second, which is five times the peak of CyBlue, an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that's been on campus since early 2006 and uses 2,048 processors to do 5.7 trillion calculations per second.

According to Aluru, the Ross Martin Mehl and Marylyne Munas Mehl Professor of Computer Engineering and the leader of the Cystorm project, the new machine also scores high on a more realistic test of a supercomputer's actual performance: 15.44 trillion calculations per second compared to CyBlue's 4.7 trillion per second.

That measure makes Cystorm 3.3 times more powerful than CyBlue.

"Cystorm is going to be very good for data-intensive research projects," Aluru said. "The capabilities of Cystorm will help Iowa State researchers do new, pioneering research in their fields," he added.

The supercomputer is targeted for work in materials science, power systems and systems biology.

Aluru said that materials scientists will use the supercomputer to analyze data from the university's Local Electrode Atom Probe microscope, an instrument that can gather data and produce images at the atomic scale of billionths of a meter.

Systems biologists will use the supercomputer to build gene networks that will help researchers understand how thousands of genes interact with each other.

Power systems researchers will use the supercomputer to study the security, reliability and efficiency of the energy infrastructure of the US.

Computer engineers will use the supercomputer to build a software infrastructure that helps users make decisions by identifying relevant information sources.

"These research efforts will lead to significant advances in the penetration of high performance computing technology," said a summary of the Cystorm project. (ANI)