- Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan on January 8, 2018, dedicated India’s fastest and first ‘multi-petaflops’ supercomputer “Pratyush” to the nation in Pune.
- ‘Pratyush’, (the sun) is the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility and it has been established at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune.
- According to the IITM, in terms of peak capacity and performance, it would be India’s number one HPC facility.
- It will be a national facility for improving weather and climate forecasts.
- It can deliver a peak power of 6.8 petaflops.
- The Pratyush is India’s second High Performance Computing (HPC) unit. The first unit is installed at Noida based National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF).
- Using this facility it would be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3 km and the globe at 12 km.
- This facility would help the nation 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.
- Through this supercomputer, Monsoon forecasting would be done using dynamical model.
- 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.
- Prayush will also be used in coordination with the Indian Meterological Department (IMD) and other weather monitoring institutes, to evolve better weather monitoring practices and an improved weather forecasting system.
What is Petflops: Petaflops is a measure of a computer’s processing speed. One petaflop is a million billion floating point operations per second.
List of world’s fastest Supercomputers
- Sunway TaihuLight — China
- Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) — China
- Piz Daint — Switzerland
- Titan — United States
- Sequoia — United States
- Cori — United States
