| 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 |
Prathyushand 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, Prathyush 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 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 2017, there have existed supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).
In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
PARAM is a series of supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. PARAM means "supreme" in the Sanskrit language, whilst also creating an acronym for "PARAllel Machine". As of June 2021 the fastest machine in the series is the PARAM Siddhi AI which ranks 89th in world with an Rpeak of 5.267 petaflops.
EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is an Indian autonomous scientific society, operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) is a scientific institution based in Pune, Maharashtra, India for expanding research in the tropical Indian Ocean with special reference to monsoon meteorology, and air-sea interaction of South Asian climate. 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 (IITM), Pune, the Earth Risk Evaluation Centre (EREC), and the Ministry of Ocean Development.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
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.
Supercomputing in India has a history going back to the 1980s. The Government of India created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign supercomputers. As of November 2020 when ranking by number of supercomputer systems in the TOP500 list, India is ranked at number 89 in the world, with the PARAM Siddhi-AI being the fastest supercomputer in India.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Titan or OLCF-3 was a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan was an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan was the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.
XK7 is a supercomputing platform, produced by Cray, launched on October 29, 2012. XK7 is the second platform from Cray to use a combination of central processing units ("CPUs") and graphical processing units ("GPUs") for computing; the hybrid architecture requires a different approach to programming to that of CPU-only supercomputers. Laboratories that host XK7 machines host workshops to train researchers in the new programming languages needed for XK7 machines. The platform is used in Titan, the world's second fastest supercomputer in the November 2013 list as ranked by the TOP500 organization. Other customers include the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre which has a 272 node machine and Blue Waters has a machine that has Cray XE6 and XK7 nodes that performs at approximately 1 petaFLOPS (1015 floating-point operations per second).
The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.
Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, capable of 200 petaFLOPS thus making it the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world after Frontier (OLCF-5), Fugaku, and LUMI. It held the number 1 position from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.
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).
The Cray XC50 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. The machine can support Intel Xeon processors, as well as Cavium ThunderX2 processors, Xeon Phi processors and NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. The processors are connected by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, in a dragonfly network topology. The XC50 is an evolution of the XC40, with the main difference being the support of Tesla P100 processors and the use of Cray software release CLE 6 or 7.
Fugaku(Japanese: 富岳) is a petascale supercomputer at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It started development in 2014 as the successor to the K computer and made its debut in 2020. It is named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji.
The A64FX is a 64-bit ARM architecture microprocessor designed by Fujitsu. The processor is replacing the SPARC64 V as Fujitsu's processor for supercomputer applications. It powers the Fugaku supercomputer, the fastest supercomputer in the world by TOP500 rankings as of June 2020 as well as November 2020, June 2021 and November 2021.
