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.