What is "kabru"

Kabru is a mountain in the Himalayas on the border of eastern Nepal and India. It is part of a ridge that extends south from Kangchenjunga and is the southernmost peak in the world.

The main features of this ridge are as follows (north to south):

• Kangchenjunga south top, 8476 m, at
• A 6600–6700 m saddle, located at
• A 7349 m summit, known as Talung, at
• A 6983 m saddle, at
• A 7412 m summit, at . This point has sufficient prominence to be classified as the highest point of a separate mountain, according to the definition used in List of highest mountains. It is confusingly referred to by some authorities as "Kabru IV", but it is not clear that this is correct, or that any "Kabru" name is correctly applied to this summit.
• A substantial "field of firn" measuring about 2 km from north to south, and 1 km from east to west. This is almost entirely over 7200 m, and the watershed divide that runs through this field does not drop below this height.
• A 7338 m summit, at ca. , at the eastern boundary of the field of firn. This point is known as Kabru North. Although it is lower than the 7412 m summit, it has been at times considered to be Kabru's highest point, with the higher summit considered to be an unnamed summit along the ridge to Kangchenjunga.
• An intervening c.7200 m saddle
• A 7318 m summit, at , known as Kabru South is the southernmost "7000 m peak" in the world.

To the south west of Kabru south, there is a 6400 m saddle and a 6682 m summit known as Rathong. To its south east is the 6600 m Kabru Dome.

Kabru is a supercomputer that uses a 2.4 GHz Pentium Xeon Cluster and Linux to provide a sustained speed of 959 gigaflops. It was developed by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) in Chennai, India. In June 2004, Kabru was listed as #264 in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful computers. It takes its name from a Himalayan peak.

The idea for Kabru was born when Professor Hari Dass of the Institute began looking for a supercomputer to handle his theoretical physics research, which dealt primarily with large-scale simulations in the field of the lattice gauge theory.

The Department of Atomic Energy in India made a grant of Rs 3.5 crore to the Institute to develop Kabru.