Supercomputers

About

A supercomputer is an exceptionally powerful computer that can perform complex calculations and process massive amounts of data at incredibly high speeds.
Supercomputers use parallel processing to divide problems and solve them simultaneously, speeding up tasks by using thousands of processors.

How do supercomputers work?

Supercomputer architectures are made up of multiple central processing units (CPUs).
These CPUs have groups composed of compute nodes and memory.
Supercomputers can contain thousands of nodes that use parallel processing to communicate with one another to solve problems.
The performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).

Did you know?

Floating-point operations are a certain kind of mathematical calculation using real numbers with fractional parts.
Due to the immense computing power of today’s computers, the FLOPs metric is most often represented in terms of billions (giga), trillions (tera), or even quadrillions (peta) of operations per second (GFLOPs, TFLOPs, PFLOPs, respectively).
- A petaflop is thus equal to a thousand TFLOPs.
In 1961, the IBM 7030 Stretch, costing a whopping $ 7.8 million at the time, performed one floating-point multiplication every 2.4 microseconds, roughly performing 417,000 FLOPs. A PlayStation 5 today is listed to have a peak performance of 10.28 TFLOP, i.e. 10.28 trillion FLOPs.
2008 was the first year when a supercomputer was able to break what was then called “the petaFLOPS barrier,” when the IBM Roadrunner shocked the world with an astounding peak performance of 1.105 petaFLOPS.
Currently, the world’s fastest computer in terms of PFLOPs is the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5 with the capability to touch a peak performance of 1,685 petaFLOPS.

Applications of supercomputers

Supercomputers find applications in various fields where substantial computational power is required such as scientific research, enabling simulations of physical phenomena, climate modeling, and molecular dynamics.
Supercomputers are also extensively used in industries such as aerospace engineering, oil exploration, financial modeling, and healthcare for tasks like computational fluid dynamics, seismic analysis, risk assessment, and drug discovery.

Supercomputers in India

The first indigenously built supercomputer under the National Supercomputing Mission was Param Shivay at Indian Institute of Technology, BHU, Varanasi in 2019.
Airawat PSAI, stands as India’s largest and fastest AI supercomputing system with a speed of 13,170 teraflops.

Why in News?

- Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched three PARAM Rudra supercomputers, a significant step in India’s push for scientific and technological advancement under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).

PARAM is a series of Indian supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune.

The supercomputers, developed indigenously at a cost of ₹130 crore, have been deployed in Pune, Delhi, and Kolkata to drive pioneering research across multiple scientific disciplines.
The PARAM Rudra supercomputers, part of India’s goal of achieving self-reliance in high-performance computing (HPC), will support advanced scientific research in various fields.

National Supercomputing Mission

NSM was launched in 2015 with the goal to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups
This mission is steered jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
The main objectives of the mission are:
- Make India a world leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) and to enhance the national capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
- Empower scientists & researchers with state-of-the-art compute facilities for their cutting-edge research in respective Domains
- Reduce redundancies and avoid duplication of efforts and investments
- Create an ecosystem for positioning India as a major power for supercomputing and attain global competitiveness and self-reliance in HPC.

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