On Monday, India unveiled Pratyush (Sun) India’s first supercomputer. A statement released by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) said, “Christened Pratyush, meaning the sun, the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility has been established at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and will be a national facility for improving weather and climate forecasts.” The release further added the facility will help the country with better forecasts in terms of monsoon, extreme events, tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes, air quality, lightning, fishing, hot and cold waves, flood and drought among others.
While inaugurating the facility in IITM the Union Science Minister, Dr. Harsh Vardhan said Pratyush will be India’s premier HPC as is a step up from India’s current peak capacity of 1.0 petaflops (PF.) Petaflops is a measure of a computer’s processing speed.
It is said the Pratyush is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world and is dedicated to weather and climate research. Pratyush will also move the Indian supercomputers from 300s to 30s in the list of top 500 in the world’s fastest supercomputers. Pratyush, an array of computers that are capable of delivering a peak power of 6.8 petaflops. One petaflop is a million billion floating point operations per second and is a reflection of the computing capacity of a system.
The supercomputers will be installed at two Government institutes which are 4.0 Petaflops HPC facility at IITM in Pune and 2.8 Petaflops at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast in Noida. With the new facility, it will be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3 Km and the Globe at 12 Km.
India has a total of 5 supercomputers including Pratyush in the top 500 supercomputers in this world. SahasraT (SERC – Cray XC40) ranked 165, Aaditya (iDataPlex DX360M4) ranked 260, TIFR – Cray XC30 ranked 355 and HP Apollo 6000 Xl230/250 ranked 391 are the rest of the four supercomputers.
