NVidia today announced that the SAGA -220 system (Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 teraflops),India’s most powerful supercomputer and the holder of the 85 position on the Top500 list released yesterday is leveraging NVidia GPUs to dramatically improve the design and analysis of the delivery vehicles critical to the nation’s space program. Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), one of the six largest space research agencies in the world, the SAGA supercomputer is used to tackle complex aeronautical problems. Harnessing the power of 640 NVidia Tesla GPUs and providing up to 394 teraflops of peak performance, SAGA enables ISRO to accelerate and improve the design and analysis of new and existing satellite launch vehicles by enabling more complex and accurate design simulations.
Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) leverages the SAGA system and the PARAS-3D application to run compute-intensive, detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations that optimize the launch vehicle design for improved performance under a range of flow conditions. With GPUs, ISRO is able to run more complex simulations 7-8 times faster than with a CPU-based system, reducing the time to create, test and finalize new designs by the same factor. The SAGA-220 is housed at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Center (VSSC) in Thiruvananthapuram, where a majority of India’s aerospace research takes place.
