SUPERCOMPUTER- SCI & TECH
News: India set to triple speed of its fastest supercomputers
What is in the news?
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Recently, the Ministry of Earth Sciences said that
India is set to dramatically scale up its super-computing prowess and install
an 18-petaflop system over the course of this year.
Key takeaways from the news:
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Processing power to such
a degree greatly eases complex mathematical calculations required, for among
other things, forecasting how the weather will be over the next few days all
the way up to two-three months ahead.
○ Flops (floating point
operations per second) are an indicator of computers processing speed and a
petaflop refers to a 1,000 trillion flops.
New Supercomputers in India:
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The new supercomputers,
yet to be named, are imported from French corporation, ATOS, an information
technology service and consulting company.
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The Modi Government
signed a deal in December 2018 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.
Supercomputers in the World:
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The fastest
high-performance computing system in the world is currently the Frontier-Cray
system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States.
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This has a peak speed of
1 exa-flop (or about 1,000 petaflops). The top 10 other systems, based on
speed, range from about 400 petaflops to 60 petaflops.
Supercomputer:
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A supercomputer is a
computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers.
●
Supercomputers are
primarily designed to be used in enterprises and organizations that require
massive computing power.
○ For
example: weather forecasting, scientific research, intelligence gathering and
analysis, data mining etc.
●
Globally, China has the
maximum number of supercomputers and maintains the top position in the world,
followed by the US, Japan, France, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland and the United
Kingdom.
Supercomputers in India:
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India’s first
supercomputer was PARAM 8000.
●
Supercomputers developed
in India are:
○ Mihir:
Mihir (146th on the list), clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing
power to match PARAM-Siddhi.
○ PARAM-Siddhi:
It is the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI)
supercomputer, and has achieved a global ranking of 62 in the TOP 500 most
powerful supercomputer systems in the world.
○ Pratyush:
It is a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of
Tropical Meteorology, ranked 78th on the November edition of the list.
○ PARAM Shivay,
-It is the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT
(BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at
IIT-Kharagpur IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur respectively.
National Supercomputing Mission:
Launched in:
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2015.
Developed by:
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It is being implemented
and steered jointly by the Department of
Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information
Technology (DeitY).
Implementation:
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Implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc),
Bengaluru.
Objectives:
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The Mission envisages
empowering national academic and R&D
institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing
grid comprising more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
●
These
supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over
the National Knowledge Network (NKN). The NKN is
another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and
R&D labs over a high-speed network.
●
The Mission includes
development of highly professional High-Performance
Computing (HPC) aware human resources for meeting challenges of development
of these applications.
Achievements:
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The first supercomputer
assembled indigenously, called Param Shivay, was installed in IIT (BHU).
●
Similar systems Param
Shakti and Param Brahma were installed at IIT-Kharagpur and IISER, Pune. They
are equipped with applications from domains like Weather and Climate,
Computational Fluid Dynamics, Bioinformatics, and Material science.