India unveils ‘Pratyush’ its fastest supercomputer.
Pratyush is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world dedicated for weather and climate research and follows machines in Japan, USA and the United Kingdom.
Pratyush is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world dedicated for weather and climate research and follows machines in Japan, USA and the United Kingdom.
- Pratyush has been established at the IITM (Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology), Pune.
- Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan dedicated India's fastest and first "multi-petaflops" supercomputer to the nation.
- Key Features of the supercomputer
- While inaugurating the facility, the minister said that it would be India's number one HPC (High-Performance Computing) facility in terms of peak capacity and performance. It would be a step up from India’s current peak capacity of 1.0 PF.
- This facility would help the country with better forecasts in terms of monsoon, extreme events, tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes, air quality, lightning, fishing, hot and cold waves, flood and drought among others.
- The machines will be installed at two government institutes: 4.0 petaflops HPC facility at IITM, Pune; and 2.8 petaflops facility at the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast, Noida.
- The government had sanctioned ₹400 crore last year to put in place a 10-petaflop machine.
- A key function of the machine’s computing power would be monsoon forecasting using a dynamical model. This requires simulating the weather for a given month and letting a custom-built model calculate how the actual weather will play out over the upcoming months.
- With the new system, it would be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3 km and the globe at 12 km.
