ISRO Develops Supercomputer SAGA-220

Thiruvananthapuram : Indian Space Research Organization 

has built a supercomputer "SAGA-220", which is to be India’s fastest in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 TeraFLOPS (220 Trillion Floating Point Operations per second).

The supercomputer "SAGA-220", built by the Satish Dhawan 

Supercomputing Facility located at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram at a cost of about Rs 14 crore was inaugurated by K Radhakrishnan, 

Chairman ISRO at VSSC today, ISRO said in a statement.

The new Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based supercomputer,    "SAGA-220" (Supercomputer 

for Aerospace with GPU Architecture-220 TeraFLOPS) is being used by space scientists for solving complex aerospace problems.

"SAGA-220” is fully designed and built by Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre using commercially available hardware, open source software components and in house developments.

The system uses 400 NVIDIA Tesla 2070 GPUs and 400 Intel Quad Core Xeon CPUs supplied by WIPRO with a high speed interconnect.With each GPU and CPU providing a performance of 500 GigaFLOPS and 50 GigaFLOPS respectively, the theoretical peak performance of the system amounts to 220 TeraFLOPS, the statement said.

The present GPU system offers significant advantage over the conventional CPU based system in terms of cost, power and space requirements, it said.

The system is environmentally green and consumes a power 

ISRO Successfully Puts GSAT-8 into Geosynchronous Orbit Read more about ISRO Successfully Puts GSAT-8 into Geosynchronous Orbit

                                                           






   ISRO Successfully Puts GSAT-8 into 






             Geosynchronous Orbit

Bangalore : Indian Space Research 

Organization (ISRO) on Wednesday 

successfully advanced communication 

satellite GSAT-8 to geosynchronous orbit 

with an orbital period of 23 hours and 45 

minutes.

Information to this effect was made by 

ISRO that the satellite's orbit has a perigee 

(closest point to Earth) of 35,543 km, an 

apogee (farthest point to Earth) of 35,770 

km and an orbital inclination of 0.04 degree 

with respect to the equatorial plane.

Solar arrays on both sides of the satellite have been deployed and they are tracking the sun and 

generating electrical power, the Bangalore-based ISRO said on Wednesday.

These solar arrays are designed to generate 6,240 W of electrical power. Two large dual grid 

Ku-band antennae have been opened and are pointing towards the Earth, it said.

On Wednesday, the satellite was put into the final orbital configuration pointing towards the 

Earth continuously.

GSAT-8 is presently located at 47 degree East longitude and is being moved towards its final 

orbital position of 55 degree East, where it will be co-located with the INSAT-3E satellite.

In Orbit Testing of 24 Ku-band transponders of GSAT-8 is scheduled to begin on 1^st 

June and the satellite is expected to be ready for service in about a month, it said.

Testing of GAGAN navigational payload would be conducted from the new Navigation Control 

Centre at Kundanahalli near Bangalore.

	Launch Date	21.05.2011
GSAT-8, India’s advanced communication satellite, is a high power communication satellite being inducted in the INSAT system. Weighing about 3100 Kg at lift-off, GSAT-8 is configured to carry 24 high power transponders in Ku-band and a two-channel GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) payload operating in L1 and L5 bands. The 24 Ku band transponders will augment the capacity in the INSAT system. The GAGAN payload provides the Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS), through which the accuracy of the positioning information obtained from the GPS Satellite is improved by a network of ground based receivers and made available to the users in the country through the geostationary satellites.

Mission Communication Weight 3093 kg (Mass at Lift – off) 1426 kg (Dry Mass) Power Solar array providing 6242 watts three 100 Ah Lithium Ion batteries Physical Dimensions 2.0 x 1.77 x 3.1m cuboid Propulsion 440 Newton Liquid Apogee Motors (LAM) with mono Methyl Hydrazine (MMH) as fuel and Mixed oxides of Nitrogen (MON-3) as oxidizer for orbit raising. Stabilisation 3-axis body stabilised in orbit using Earth Sensors, Sun Sensors, Momentum and Reaction Wheels, Magnetic Torquers and eight 10 Newton and eight 22 Newton bipropellant thrusters Antennas Two indigenously developed 2.2 m diameter transmit/receive polarisation sensitive dual grid shaped beam deployable reflectors with offset-fed feeds illumination for Ku-band; 0.6 m C-band and 0.8x0.8 sq m L-band helix antenna for GAGAN Launch date May 21, 2011 Launch site Kourou, French Guiana Launch vehicle Ariane-5 VA-202 Orbit Geosynchronous (55° E) Mission life More Than 12 Years