Pratyush supercomputer
India has developed its fastest supercomputer yet, Pratyush, which is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world dedicated for weather and climate research. It follows machines from Japan, USA and the United Kingdom. It can deliver 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 machines will be installed at two government institutes: 4.0 petaflops HPC facility at IITM, Pune; and 2.8 petaflops facility at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast, Noida.
A key function of the machine’s computing power would be monsoon forecasting using a dynamical model. This requires simulating the weather for a given month — say March — and letting a custom-built model calculate how the actual weather will play out over June, July, August and September. With the new system, it would be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3 km and the globe at 12 km.
