India set to triple speed of its fastest supercomputers

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Art and Culture

Concept :

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 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,
Climate Modelling
Weather Prediction
Aerospace Engineering including CFD, CSM, CEM
Computational Biology
Molecular Dynamics
Atomic Energy Simulations
National Security/ Defence Applications
Seismic Analysis
Disaster Simulations and Management
Computational Chemistry
Computational Material Science and Nano-materials
Discoveries beyond Earth (Astrophysics)
Large Complex Systems Simulations and Cyber Physical Systems
Big Data Analytics
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.