High Performance Computing in India
Context:
- India will likely have the fastest “supercomputer” in the world later this year, or more accurately, an enhanced “high performance computing (HPC)” machine.
Regarding HPC System:
- The French business Atos, which offers consulting and IT services, will construct and install this system. With France, the central government agreed to buy high-performance computers worth 4,500 crore by 2025.
- The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Noida, which now house two of India’s most potent such machines, Mihir and Pratyush, respectively, would host these HPC systems.
HPC applications:
- The Atos machines, like their forerunners, will be largely utilised to run complex weather models that have been used for some time to create a variety of forecasts, from long-term monsoon to fortnightly as well as daily weather fluctuations.
- Because good projections depend on being able to mimic the state of the atmosphere and oceans, extremely powerful equipment are required for this task.
- The possession of HPCs is also used as a medallion by countries wishing to signify their technological prowess, despite the fact that, aside from weather modelling, many difficult research questions — protein biology, aerospace-modeling applications, and now AI-linked applications — are highly dependent on computing.
- The term “supercomputers” is a buzzword that is constantly changing. Supercomputers from twenty years ago are today’s gaming consoles and laptops for students. A supercomputer is a computer that operates at or close to the maximum operational rate currently available for computers.
The Top500 initiative:
- A list of the top 500 most powerful HPC machines has been kept by this initiative for more than 20 years, and it is updated twice a year.
- With a peak speed of 13 petaflops, a machine housed in Pune’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) is currently the sole Indian computer in the top 100. (Floating point operations per second (FLOPS), which equal 1,000 trillion, are a measure of a computer’s processing power. )
- The French machines that will soon be deployed are anticipated to be 18 petaflops, while India currently has a few machines in the petaflop level at numerous research facilities.
- The availability of strong supercomputers gives Indian scientists confidence that they can always use these behemoths to solve difficult problems, but it is debatable whether their use has resulted in important advances in either engineering or fundamental science.
Conclusion:
- Similar to how India has improved its short-term weather forecasts and increased the accuracy of its cyclone forecasts thanks to such computers, there should be more consideration given to their use in other disciplines rather than only focusing on their speed and power.
