Eviden bags $100 mn supercomputer order from NCMRWF

Eviden bags $100 mn supercomputer order from NCMRWF

Subject: Science and Technology

Section: Awareness in IT and Computer

Context: Eviden has received a $100 million contract on behalf of the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences to build two new supercomputers dedicated to weather modelling and climate research for IITM (Indian Institute of Technology Madras) and NCMRWF (The National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting).

Details:

• These systems, based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000, will have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops and will rely on Eviden’s patented Direct Liquid Cooling technology to cool the system using warm water.
• The NCMRWF supercomputer will have an 8.3-petaflop computing capacity for weather and climate modelling, to support advanced numerical weather research across India. This platform will bring together 2,100 CPU nodes with AMD EPYCTM 7643 processors, 18 GPU nodes using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform, and high-performance memory provided by Micron. NCMRWF supercomputer will also have 2PB all flash and 20PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 parallel filesystem storage.
• The supercomputer dedicated to the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM, Pune) will provide 13 Petaflops of power for atmosphere and climate research. It will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYCTM 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes through NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with In-Network Computing, 3PB all flash and 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage and Micron high-technology memory.

What are FLOPs?

• FLOPs is a metric used for measurement of computational performance -processing power and efficiency, especially in the field of high performance computing (HPC) and Artificial intelligence (AI).
• Floating point operations are a certain kind of mathematical calculation using real numbers and fractional parts. FLOPS are not only a metric for computational performance but Memory bandwidth ,latency are also crucial factors. Nevertheless, FLOPs act as a baseline to judge performance where calculations dominate.

Current Supercomputers of  India and world

• Currently ,the World’ fastest supercomputer in terms of Petaflops is Hewlett Packered’s Enterprise frontier ,or OCLF-5,with the peak performance of 1685.65 petaflops.
• In India NCMRWF(National centre for medium range weather forecasting) houses ‘Mihir’, a 2.8 petaflops supercomputer and ‘Pratyush’ 4.0 petaflops supercomputer at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology(IITM) at Pune. Out of 18 new supercomputers 10 will be installed at NCMRWF at Noida and 8 at IITM ,Pune.

About National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

• The four major pillars of the NSM, namely, Infrastructure, Applications, R&D, HRD, have been functioning efficiently to realize the goal of developing indigenous supercomputing eco system of the nation.
• Some of the large-scale applications which are being developed under NSM include the following,

1. Climate Modelling
2. Weather Prediction
3. Aerospace Engineering including CFD, CSM, CEM
4. Computational Biology
5. Molecular Dynamics
6. Atomic Energy Simulations
7. National Security/ Defence Applications
8. Seismic Analysis
9. Disaster Simulations and Management
10. Computational Chemistry
11. Computational Material Science and Nano-materials
12. Discoveries beyond Earth (Astrophysics)
13. Large Complex Systems Simulations and Cyber Physical Systems
14. Big Data Analytics
15. Finance

• Information repositories/ Government Information SystemsBeing steered jointly by: Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST)
• Being implemented by: Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.