India unveils Pratyush, its fastest supercomputer yet

Why is it in news?

India’s supercomputing prowess moved up several notches after it unveiled Pratyush.

Details

• The name “Pratyush” means ‘the sun’.
• Pratyush is an array of computers that can deliver a peak power of 6.8 petaflops. (One petaflop is a million billion floating point operations per second and is a reflection of the computing capacity of a system).
• According to Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pratyush is the fourth fastest computer in the world dedicated to weather and climate research
• It will also move an Indian supercomputer from the 300s to 30s in the top 500 list, a respected tracker of world’s fastest supercomputers.
• The machines will be installed at two government institutes: 4.0 petaflops facility at IITM, Pune and 2.8 petaflops facility at National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast, Noida.
• The government had sanctioned Rs.400crore last year to put in place a 10-petaflop machine.
• The key function of the machine’s computing power would be monsoon forecasting using a dynamic model. This requires simulating the weather for a given month (Eg. March) and letting a custom-built model calculate how the actual weather will play out over June, July, August and September. With the new system, it would be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3km and the globe at 10km.

Conclusion

• The creation of Pratyush is a big step up from its current peak capacity of 1.0 petaflops.
• The success in creation of this system will also promote India’s technological prowess and bolster India’s image as a rising technological power.
• This system, with better weather prediction facilities, can also help in better disaster prevention, mitigation and overall management.

Source

The Hindu