8 Indian supercomps in world's top 500 list
Bangalore |
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Hewlett Packard (HP), the world’s biggest maker of personal computers, on Friday said that a total of eight entries in the list of top 500 supercomputers are from India and six out of the eight entries are from HP. Among vendors, HP leads the list with a 41.8 % share of the systems, followed by IBM (37%), Dell (4%) and Cray (4%).
Supercomputer Eka, a HP-based system with a performance of 132.8 teraflops (floating point operations per second) has been ranked at number 13. Eka belongs to the Tata Group’s Computational Research Laboratories.
The rankings are released twice a year by researchers at the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim, Germany, and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The HP-based Param cluster of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing has been ranked 68th.
The other supercomputers by HP from India are for an industrial research company (334), a research agency (428), IIT-Madras (436) and Paprikaas Interactive Services (478).
The two other supercomputers from India out of the eight in the list include IBM’s eServer Blue Gene Solution for Indian Institute Science ranked at 213 and a supercomputer for Digital Media Company (G) ranked at 481.
IBM’s Roadrunner has been ranked as number one in the list. The system, only the second to break the petaflop barrier, posted a top performance of 1.059 petaflops. One petaflop represents one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
Source: The Economic Times |
More IT projects likely to come India's way: PWC
Bangalore |
At a time when customers in the US are battling with economic recession, they will send more information technology projects to India, in order to bring down their costs of operations, according to a study done by Offshoring Research Network (ORN), in alliance with Duke University and research firm PricewaterhouseCoopers."Enhancing efficiencies has become more urgent in recent months as pressure on margins forces companies to increase productivity while spending less," said Arie Lewin, professor of strategy and international business at the Duke University.
Almost forty of the 100 companies interviewed as part of the survey said that they plan to put pressure on service providers for more favorable contract terms in order to trim costs. “Many companies are asking vendors to bear the upfront costs of a contract, and are even seeking longer project implementation periods,” Mr Lewin added.
Experts such as Hari Rajagopalachari, executive director of PricewaterhouseCoopers said the cost of acquiring new business will go up as customers demand more investments from the vendors. Meanwhile, the study also found that captive operations of American companies will increasingly get involved with doing niche projects apart from managing third party relationships on behalf of their parent organisations in India.
"Captives will get more involved with costs, and will move away from doing work, which can be outsourced to third party vendors," said Mr Rajagopalachari.
While efficiency enhancement and cost reduction are among companies’ top priorities, 12 percent of respondents noted they are considering spinning off their captive operations to a provider or have already done so.
Such an option would require significant time and effort to negotiate and capital resources for financing acquisitions are likely to be scarce, the PwC study added.
Source: The Economic Times |
| 3i Infotech gets I-Serv to empower rural India |
3i Infotech, global information technology company, announced the launch of I-Serv, a brand for its retail services through which a comprehensive range of services like Banking, Insurance, Mobile etc will be provided to the consumers in the remote areas and empowering them in their daily activities.
Anirudh Prabhakaran, executive director and president-South Asia of 3i Infotech Limited announcing the first of its kind services, catering to the rural pockets, said that it (I-Serv) will bring the benefits of technology to the doorsteps of the common man. Prabhakaran, a product of BITS Pilani has a long experience of working with the IT sector and has worked with Wipro Infotech for over 14 years before joining 3i Infotech in June 2006.
The newly launched I-Serv will serve the rural customers through 12,500 stores across nine states including Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Delhi. To ensure maximum utility to the rural customers, I-Serv stores will be managed by trained operators and will be equipped with the latest IT infrastructure including PCs, scanners, telephones and round-the-clock connectivity.
Laying stress on the techniques to leverage technology for the benefit of the masses, Prabhakaran says, “The real benefit of technology is when the common man in the rural areas starts benefiting from the IT Enabled Rural Retail (ITERR) services. Our idea of technology is to use it as a medium of service and not the end in itself.”
I-Serv stores which will also house a training manual in local language will benefit between 300 to 3000 households by offering a bouquet of products & services. The consumers will be charged Rs 5 per service and each household will be offered at least five services.
Talking about the viability of the I-Serve in rural areas, Prabhakaran highlights that rural India houses more than 70% of India’s population and represents a unique opportunity to employ technological capabilities for bridging the existing urban-rural divide. “We are proud to be one of the pioneers to roll out a service aimed at providing affordable value added services to the end customers, thereby transforming lives of consumers on a larger scale,” Prabhakaran asserts.
Out of the target of 12,500 stores which the company endeavors to accomplish in the coming 12 months, 50% of the stores will be operated through the local entrepreneurs and the remaining 50% will be managed by the personnel employed by the company. Talking about the jobs the company is going to generate Prabhakaran says, “Generating jobs was never a guiding factor for us, but the company is going to employ at least 12, 500 people to look after the stores.
Source: Business Standard |
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Move aside desktops; here come 'nettops'
It all started with the advent and success of smaller laptops or netbooks, as they are called, in June 2008. Now, Indian and multinational PC makers like Asus, HCL Infosystems and Wipro are ready to give a push to the retail sales of even smaller desktops or Nettops, based on Intel Atom processors. Others like Dell, HP and Lenovo are expected to follow.
The system (excluding the monitor) is understood to cost around Rs 6,000 to assemble. However, the retail price points range between Rs 11,000 and Rs 18,000 since the manufacturers include a CRT (bulky) or LCD (thin) monitor and optional CD/DVD drives. The nettop comes loaded with a printer and universal serial bus (USB) ports. Aimed primarily at e-mail and Internet users, nettops and netbooks provide a low-cost option for education, photo and video viewing, social networking, voice over IP, e-mail, messaging, browsing and other Internet activities as well as for basic applications,
“They are not suitable for high-end gaming but anyway, that's not the purpose,” said Intel India Managing Director (sales and marketing), South Asia, Ramamurthy Sivakumar, He explained that Intel went slow on nettops “simply because we did not have enough processors”. “We are now laser-focused on nettops, and committed to matching the demand. Surprisingly, the response from developed markets too has been good,” he said.
These PCs weigh less than a kg, consume less than 10 watts against over 60 watts that normal PCs use and are less noisy because the use of the fan is reduced. “This has opened up a new computing paradigm,” said Sivakumar.
The increasing popularity of brands like the Asus Eee box and HCL's Neutron (priced at Rs 17,999) has made Intel realise there is a market for budget desktops in emerging and mature markets as well. The netbook/notebook segment category is a result of designing smaller, yet low-cost chips, now called Intel Atom, formerly known as 'Diamondville' which features the 45-nanometer manufacturing process.
Incidentally, players like Chennai-based Novatium have partnered MTNL to offer cheap desktops at less than Rs 10,000 (including the service, monitors and so on). The desktop called netPC costs just Rs 4,999. However, Novatium offers a managed service which means that customers store data on the Novatium servers. Nevertheless, analysts say it's a good option for small- and medium enterprises too. Over 7,000 netPCs have been sold to date.
Research firm IDC has predicted that the new market segment, comprising small, energy-efficient and low-cost devices (netbooks and nettops), could grow from fewer than 500,000 in 2007 to 9 million in 2012 as the market for second computers expands in developed economies.
The government in consultation with the industry identified that the cost of computers, Internet access, and non-availability of suitable content in the local language, tools interfaces and applications for the rural population were the major reasons for low PC penetration in the country.
Intel, according to Sivakumar, is hopeful that nettops will help the Indian government bridge the digital divide.
Source: Business Standard |
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