| Active | 8 January 2018 |
|---|---|
| Location | Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida |
| Speed | 6.8 PetaFlops [1] |
| Cost | INR 4,389,000,000 |
| Purpose | Weather forecasting, Climate research |
Pratyushand Mihir are the supercomputers established at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune and National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF), Noida respectively. As of January 2018, Pratyush and Mihir are the fastest supercomputer in India with a maximum speed of 6.8 PetaFlops at a total cost of INR 438.9 Crore. [2] The system was inaugurated by Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for science and technology, on 8 January 2018.The word 'Pratyush' (Hindi : प्रत्युष) defines the rising sun. [2] [1] [3] [4]
Being a High Performance Computing (HPC) facility, Pratyush and Mihir consists of several computers that can deliver a peak power of 6.8 PetaFlops. [note 1] It is the first multi-PetaFlops supercomputer ever built in India. [4]
Pratyush and Mihir are two High Performance Computing (HPC) units. They are located at two government institutes, one being 4.0 PetaFlops unit at IITM, Pune and another 2.8 PetaFlops unit at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Noida. They provide a combined output of 6.8 PetaFlops. [4] [2]
Pratyush and Mihir are used in the fields of weather forecasting and climate monitoring in India. [4] 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. [3] 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. [4] [1]
The High Performance Computing (HPC) facility in India has grown from 40 TeraFlops in 2008 to 1 PetaFlops in the year 2013–14. [4] But India still remained at a lower position in terms of HPC infrastructure rankings in the world. [4]
Government of India approved 400 crore Rupees in 2017 to build a supercomputer with a computing capacity of 10 PetaFlops. [1] The engineers of IITM, Pune worked under the leadership of Suryachandra A Rao and built Pratyush in 2018. [5] The overall cost was around 450 crore Indian Rupees. [4]
With the introduction of Pratyush and Mihir, India hopes to move from the 165th position to gain a position in the top 30s in the Top500 list of supercomputers in the world. [6]
A supercomputer is a type of 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). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
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The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) is a scientific institution based in Pune, Maharashtra, India for expanding research on the Ocean-Atmosphere Climate System required for the improvement of Weather and Climate Forecasts. IITM focuses on research in tropical meteorology and climate science, it functions as a national center for basic and applied research in monsoon meteorology. It is an autonomous institute of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India.
The Ministry of Earth Sciences was formed on 29 January 2006 from a merger of the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune (IITM), the Earth Risk Evaluation Centre (EREC) and the Ministry of Ocean Development.
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Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
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Summit or OLCF-4 was a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States of America. It held the number 1 position on the TOP500 list from November 2018 to June 2020. As of June 2024, its LINPACK benchmark was clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS. Summit was decommissioned on November 15, 2024.
AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) is a planned supercomputer being built at the University of Tokyo for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. It is being built by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. ABCI is expected to be completed in first quarter 2018 with a planned performance of 130 petaFLOPS. Power consumption is targeting 3 megawatts, and a planned power usage effectiveness of 1.1. If performance meets expectations, ABCI would be the second most powerful supercomputer built, surpassing the current leader Sunway TaihuLight's 93 petaflops. But still behind the Summit supercomputer.
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