Supercomputing

Supercomputing

News: 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.

What is Supercomputing?
 Supercomputing is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Petaflops are a measure of a computer's processing speed equal to a thousand trillion flops. And a 1-petaflop computer system can perform one quadrillion (1015) flops. From a different perspective, supercomputers can be one million times more processing power than the fastest laptop.

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.
 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.