SUPERCOMPUTERS IN INDIA

What are Supercomputers?

A computer or array of computers that act as one collective machine capable of processing enormous amounts of data.
Supercomputers are used for very complex jobs such as nuclear research or forecasting weather patterns.
The size of a supercomputer can differ widely, depending on how many computers make up the supercomputer.
A supercomputer could be made up of 10, 100, 1000, or more computers, all working together.
Flops (floating point operations per second) are an indicator of computers processing speed and a petaflop refers to a 1,000 trillion flops.
Processing power to such a degree greatly eases complex mathematical calculations required, for among other things, forecasting how the weather will be over the next few days all the way up to two-three months ahead.

India’s Supercomputers

Currently India’s most powerful, civilian supercomputers — Pratyush and Mihir — with a combined capacity of 6.8 petaflops are housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Noida, respectively.
The AI Supercomputer ‘AIRAWAT’, installed at C-DAC, Pune has been ranked 75th in the world. It was declared so in the 61st edition of Top 500 Global Supercomputing List yesterday at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) in Germany. It puts India on top of AI Supercomputing nations worldwide. The system is installed under National Program on AI by Government of India.

Why in News?

India is set to dramatically scale up its super-computing prowess and install an 18-petaflop system over the course of this year.

Reference:

Daily Pulse