What is NSM?
National Supercomputing Mission is an important initiative by Government of India to boost indigenous efforts to be in the forefront of supercomputing capability for socio-economic development of the nation. The mission jointly steered by Ministry of Electronics and IT and Department of Science & Technology, is being implemented through two leading organizations – Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore with an objective to meet the increasing computing demands of the scientific and research community. Experts from various organisations including NITI Aayog, IIT, JNU, DRDO and BARC have made substantial contributions towards implementing this mission. This initiative supports the government’s vision of “Digital India” and “Make in India” and will place India at the forefront of global supercomputing map.
Where is “PARAM Shivay” installed and what are its applications?
The first Supercomputer designed and built under Build approach of National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) by C-DAC at Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi was dedicated by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi to the scientific and research community of the nation in order to strengthen the research and development activities in the country. Named “PARAM Shivay”, the supercomputer uses more than one lakh twenty thousand compute cores (CPU + GPU cores) to offer a peak compute power of 833 TeraFlops.
It is currently developing appplications internally and testing these on the Param Shavay computers. Param Shavay are the smaller ‘supercomputers in a box’ that C-DAC provides to academic institutes across India.
It will be applied in many areas like climate assessment, weather forecasting, space engineering, seismic analysis, finance, disaster simulation and management, search astrophysics, macro-data analytics, information collection.
India by the beginning of 2019 has 32 supercomputers across institutions, with a combined capacity of 12.77 peta flops with two machines - Pratyush at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune and Mihir at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Noida rank in the top 100 supercomputers in the world.
Elaborate on Pratyush and Mihir.
Pratyush and Mihir are the supercomputers established at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune and National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF), Noida respectively. Pratyush and Mihir are the fastest supercomputer in India with a maximum speed of 6.8 PetaFlops.
Pratyush and Mihir are used in the fields of weather forecasting and climate monitoring in India. It helps the country to make better forecasts in terms of Monsoon, fishing, air quality, extreme events like Tsunami, cyclones, earthquakes, lightning and other natural calamities such as floods, droughts etc. India is the fourth country in the world to have a High Performance Computing facility dedicated for weather and climate research after Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom.