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Tata’s focus on supercomputing will cement India’s reputation as a burgeoning centre for IT excellence and comes as the country’s leading IT players seeks to move up the industry’s value chain – to move away from commoditised outsourcing services to more lucrative research work.

But American manufacturers still dominate the Top500 league table.

IBM’s Blue Gene/L remains the world’s most powerful – the fourth consecutive year it has held the top spot. Blue Gene/L, based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is nearly three times faster than its nearest rival.

Blue Gene/L was expanded this summer to deliver a sustained performance of 478 trillion calculations per second (478 “teraflops”). The No.2 computer in the world – Europe’s fastest – is Blue Gene/P, a sister machine to Blue Gene/L located at the research consortium Julich in Germany. Blue Gene/P clocks in at 167 teraflops.

EKA achieved a sustained performance of 117.9 teraflops.

However, the holy grail for the engineers behind supercomputers remains the “petaflop” milestone – the ability to process 1,000 trillion calculations every second.

Petaflop computers promise exponential breakthroughs in science and engineering by providing predictive and highly detailed simulations, according to analysts.

“Earthquake simulations, for example, could show building-by-building movements of entire regions along the San Andreas fault, improving future designs of earthquake-resistant structures,” an IBM spokesman said.

The fastest system in the UK is HECToR, based in Edinburgh University. Launched last month, the system cost £113 million, is expected to have a lifespan of seven years and is ranked the seventeenth most powerful machine in the world.

HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is working on projects including forecasting climate change, simulating ocean currents, projecting the spread of epidemic diseases and developing new drugs.

A supercomputer built for the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, comes in at No 35.

Like HECToR, it was built by Cray, the Nasdaq-listed supercomputer specialist.

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