Floating point operations system (FLOPs) and Supercomputers

Floating point operations system(FLOPs) and Supercomputers

Subject : Science and Technology

Section:

Context

India will unveil its 18 new supercomputers for weather forecasting institutes later this year. The new supercomputer is expected to improve weather forecasts at the block level, help weather scientists give higher resolution ranges of the forecast, predict cyclones with more accuracy and better lead time, and provide ocean states forecasts, including marine quality forecasts.

The new will improve forecasts from 12 km resolution to 6 km resolution.

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.