SUPERCOMPUTERS
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Context:
- Recently, Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” was established at IIT Roorkee under National Supercomputing Mission.
- “PARAM Ganga”, has a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops.
About:
- A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer.
- The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Supercomputers were started in 1960s.
Petaflop
- A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
- Floating-point numbers have decimal points in them. The number 2.0 is a floating-point number because it has a decimal in it. The number 2 (without a decimal point) is a binary integer.
- Specific to floating-point numbers, a floating-point operation is any mathematical operation (such as +, -, *, /) or assignment that involves floating-point numbers (as opposed to binary integer operations).
Applications:
- Supercomputers have a wide variety of applications such as weather forecasting, aerospace engineering, automobile crash and safety modeling, quantum physics, physical simulations, molecular modeling, oil and gas exploration, defense applications and many more.
- Other applications include virtual reality, computational chemistry, finance, transportation, etc.
India’s National Supercomputing Mission:
Launch
- The National Supercomputing Mission was launched in 2015 for over a period of seven years.
Development and Implementation
- The Mission is being jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- It is being implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc),
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 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
- To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing
- To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology.
Supercomputers in India:
- India's fastest supercomputer PARAM SIDDHI AI, ranked #62 globally.
- Some other supercomputers of India are: Cray XC40-based Pratyush, Mihir, Param Shivay etc.
- CDAC has designed and developed a compute server “Rudra” and high-speed interconnect “Trinetra” which are the major sub-assemblies required for supercomputers.
- By 2022, the government aims to install 73 indigenous supercomputers across the country.
The Fugaku supercomputer located at RIKEN Centre for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan is the world's fastest supercomputer. |
Applications of Supercomputers under National Supercomputing Mission:
Some of the large-scale applications which are being developed under NSM include the following.
- NSM Platform for Genomics and Drug Discovery.
- Urban Modelling: Science Based Decision Support Framework to Address Urban Environment Issues (Meteorology, Hydrology, Air Quality).
- Flood Early Warning and Prediction System for River Basins of India.
- HPC Software Suite for Seismic Imaging to aid Oil and Gas Exploration.
- MPPLAB: Telecom Network Optimization.
Final Thought:
- Availability of indigenous supercomputers will accelerate the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of science and engineering paving the way for self-reliance in the field.