Context: India is set to unveil its new 18 Peta-flop supercomputer for weather forecasting institutes later in 2023.
Flops (floating point operations per second) are an indicator of the processing speed of computers and a petaflop refers to a 1,000 trillion flops.
Major Highlights:
- Currently, The National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida, houses 'Mihir', a 2.8 petaflop supercomputer and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune has 'Pratyush', a 4.0 petaflop supercomputer.
- The new supercomputer will be bought at Rs 900 crores, and once it is unveiled, 'Mihir' and 'Pratyush', launched in 2018, will be decommissioned.
Significance:
- The new high-power computing facility 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 lead time and ocean state forecast, including marine water quality forecasts.
- Processing power to such a degree greatly eases the complex mathematical calculations required for accurate weather forecasting, among others.
- E.g., It can be used to forecast how the weather will be over the next few days up to two or three months ahead.
Key Facts:
- The AI Supercomputer ‘AIRAWAT’, installed at C-DAC, Pune has been ranked 75th in the world with a remarkable speed of 13,170 teraflops.
- It was declared in the 61st edition of the Top 500 Global Supercomputing List at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) in Germany.
- 1 teraflop is equal to one trillion floating-point operations per second (flops).
- The fastest high-performance computing system in the world is currently the Frontier-Cray system at Oakridge National Laboratory, United States. This has a peak speed of one exa-flop (or about 1,000 petaflops).
To know more about ‘India’s supercomputing ambitions’, kindly refer to the link given below: https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/powering-up-indias-supercomputing-ambitions/