Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan on 8th January 2018 dedicated India’s fastest and first ‘multi-petaflops’ supercomputer Pratyush to the nation at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. 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, an IITM release said. While inaugurating the facility, the minister said that it would be India’s number one HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and performance.
Pratyush has 6.8 PF computational power installed at two MoES Institutes. 4.0 Peta Flops HPC facility at IITM, Pune and 2.8 Peta Flops facility at NCMRWF, Noida. (PF is a measure of a computer’s processing speed). Pratyush is fourth fastest supercomputer in world dedicated for weather and climate research. It follows supercomputing machines in Japan, US and United Kingdom. It will improve rankings of Indian supercomputer from 300s to 30s in Top500 list, a respected international tracker of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The key function of the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility will be monsoon forecasting using dynamical model which requires simulating weather for given month and letting custom-built model calculate impact of actual weather over coming months. It will enable to map regions in India at resolution of 3 km and globe at 12 km.
