India set to triple speed of its fastest supercomputers

Published
26th May, 2023

Context

According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), India is set to dramatically scale up its super-computing prowess and install an 18-petaflop system over the course of this year.

Key highlights:

The most important details are that India's most powerful supercomputers, Pratyush and Mihir, with a combined capacity of 8 petaflops, are housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF).
These supercomputers were made operational in 2018 at an investment of 438 crore and will be housed at the IITM and NCMRWF.

Imported from France

The Government of India has signed a deal with France to procure high-performance computers worth 4,500 crore by 2025.
The new earth-sciences Ministry computers are likely to cost 900 crore and will improve resolution to 6*6 km, meaning four times as many pixels can be used to represent a given area.
The fastest high-performance computing system in the world is currently the Frontier-Cray system at Oakridge National Laboratory, with a peak speed of 1 exa-flop.
The top 10 other systems range from 400 petaflops to 60 petaflops.

About Supercomputer:

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer.
Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
Supercomputers contain tens of thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations or computations per second.
Some supercomputers can perform up to a hundred quadrillion FLOPS.
Since information moves quickly between processors in a supercomputer (compared to distributed computing systems) they are ideal for real-time applications.
Supercomputers are used for data-intensive and computation-heavy scientific and engineering purposes such as quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling, physical simulations, aerodynamics, nuclear fusion research and cryptoanalysis.