India set to triple speed of its fastest supercomputers
- Category
Science & Technology
- Published
26th May, 2023
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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.
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