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India’s supercomputing capabilities

  • Posted By
    10Pointer
  • Categories
    Science & Technology
  • Published
    7th Jul, 2022

Context

As per the global ranking service of super-computers (Top 500), India has only 3 top-ranked supercomputers among 500 and none in the top 100.

  • The world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, offers a peak performance of 1,685 PFlops.

India’s steps towards supercomputer

  • National Supercomputing Mission (NSM): Fifteen supercomputers, with an aggregate compute capacity of 24 petaflops, have been installed in the country since 2015 under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
  • The National Supercomputing Mission (started in 2015) is intended to indigenise the development and manufacturing of powerful computers., with the National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone
  • The mission is planned in three phases:
    • Phase I Looks at assembling supercomputers
    • Phase II looks at manufacturing certain components within the country
    • Phase III where a supercomputer is designed by India
  • A department of MeitY, C-DAC is responsible for designing, developing, and commissioning supercomputers under NSM.

Objectives

  • To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance.
  • To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.

Supercomputer in India

  • Mihir: Mihir (146th on the list), clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing power to match PARAM-Siddhi.
  • PARAM-Siddhi:  It is the high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, and has achieved a global ranking of 62 in the TOP 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world.
  • Pratyush: It is a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, ranked 78th on the November edition of the list.
  • PARAM Shivay, -It is the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur respectively.

Application of Supercomputing

  • Weather Forecasting
  • Scientific Research
  • Data Mining

Challenges of Supercomputing in India

  • Lack of Research & Development in India.
  • Lack of Funding.
  • Limited manufacturing of electronics used in Supercomputing missions.

What is a Supercomputer?

  • A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers.
  • India’s first supercomputer was PARAM 8000.
    • It was developed by the Centre for Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in 1991, with a speed of 1 Gigaflop.
  • PARAM Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously.
  • The computing power of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second, or FLOPS. 
  • PetaFlops: One PetaFlops is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) FLOPS, or one thousand TeraFlops.

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