FLOPS - SCI & TECH
News: India
will unveil 18 new petaFLOP supercomputers for weather forecasting in 2023
What's in the news?
● Union
Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju said that India will unveil its new 18 petaFLOP supercomputer for weather
forecasting institutes later this year.
Key takeaways:
● 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 (the difference
between a phenomenon being forecast and actually occuring), and provide ocean
state forecasts, including marine water quality forecasts.
● Presently,
we give forecasts with a 12-kilometre resolution. The new supercomputer will
improve it to six-kilometre resolution.
India's aim is to achieve one-kilometre resolution forecasts.
FLOPs:
● FLOPs,
or Floating-Point Operations per Second, is a commonly used metric to measure the 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
with fractional parts.
What is a petaFLOP?
● Due
to the immense computing power of today’s computers, the FLOPs metric is most
often represented in terms of billions
(giga), trillions (tera), or even quadrillions (peta) of operations per second
(GFLOPs, TFLOPs, PFLOPs, respectively).
● A petaflop is thus equal
to a thousand TFLOPs or 1015 FLOPs.
Are FLOPs the only metric to judge a computer’s
performance?
● FLOPs
are not the only factor determining the performance of a computing system. Memory bandwidth, latency, and other
architectural features also play significant roles.
● Nonetheless,
FLOPs provide a valuable baseline for comparing the computational capabilities
of different systems, especially in tasks where floating-point calculations
dominate.
Is India already using petaFLOPs computers for weather
forecasting?
● The
NCMRWF houses ‘Mihir’, a 2.8
petaflop supercomputer, while the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology
(IITM), Pune, is home to ‘Pratyush’, a 4.0 petaflop supercomputer.
● NCMRWF
will be allocated eight PFLOPs computing power with the remaining 10 PFLOPs
going to IITM.
○ The
Pune-based institute requires higher power as it deals with seasonal weather
forecasts while the NCMRWF deals with medium-range forecasts for a period
extending three to seven days in advance.