Why in News?

• A new supercomputer in Wyoming, U.S., will rank among the world’s fastest and help study phenomena including climate change, severe weather, wildfires and solar flares.

What is a supercomputer?

• • A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). 
  • Supercomputers contain tens of thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations or computations per second.
  • Some supercomputers can perform up to a hundred quadrillion FLOPS. Since information moves quickly between processors in a supercomputer (compared to distributed computing systems) they are ideal for real-time applications.

• A teraflop is a measure of a computer’s speed equivalent to a trillion floating point operations per second. It is a measure of the processing speed of a computer.

About the new Supercomputer

• The HPE-Cray EX supercomputer will theoretically be able to perform almost 20 quadrillion calculations per second — 3.5 times faster than the existing machine at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center.
• The new machine’s maximum speed per second will be roughly equivalent to each person on Earth completing a math equation every second for an entire month.         

Uses of Supercomputers

• Common applications for supercomputers include testing mathematical models for complex physical phenomena or designs, such as climate and weather, evolution of the cosmos, nuclear weapons and reactors, new chemical compounds (especially for pharmaceutical purposes), and cryptology.
• That power will enable some of the most sophisticated simulations yet of large-scale natural and human-influenced events.
• Academic research: For observing and simulating the phenomena which are too big, too small, too fast, or too slow to observe in laboratories. For example, astrophysicists use supercomputers as “time machines” to explore the past and the future of our universe. Another important area is quantum mechanics.
• Weather and climate modeling to forecast with better accuracy by analyzing multiple factors and their interrelationships.
• Medicine discovery 
• Monsoon Forecasting using dynamic Models.
• Big data mining to strengthen and better mobilization of digital India mission.
• Oil and gas exploration
• Aerodynamics research and development
• Simulation of nuclear fission and fusion processes, therefore giving  better nuclear infrastructure models
• Molecular dynamics– supercomputer simulations allow scientists to dock two molecules together to study their interaction which may lead to the development of innovative materials
• Predicting future comet collision with the earth.

 India and Supercomputers

• 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 Siddhi is a High Performance Computing-Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer developed by Department of Science and Technology (DST), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. Param Siddhi is ranked 63rd among top 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world.
• PARAM-Siddhi is the second Indian supercomputer to be entered in the top 100 on the Top500 list. Pratyush, a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology is also in the top 100 list.
• Another Indian supercomputer, Mihir (146th on the list), clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing power to match PARAM-Siddhi.

National Supercomputing Mission

• Envisages empowering our national academic and Research and Development (R&D) institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid
• These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN).
• The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network.
• The Mission is implemented and steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY).
• The (C-DAC) has recently launched the second phase of this project wherein more institutions will be supported by supercomputing facilities.

Objectives of NSM

• 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 empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains

 Reference:

1. https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/new-supercomputer-in-wyoming-to-rank-among-worlds-fastest/article33681098.ece