Meet Pratyush, India's Weather Predicting Supercomputer, The 4th Most Powerful In The World
The system register 6.8 petaflops of power at peak performance.
India just took its supercomputing game to the next level, with a new addition from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
Image for representational purposes only
IITM on Monday unveiled Pratyush, a 6.8 petaflop array of processors dedicated to weather and climate analysis. For those of you that don¡¯t know why that¡¯s impressive, a petaflop is a measure of a supercomputer¡¯s processing speed, meaning int can perform one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). For Pratyush, multiply that measure by 6.8.
According to IITM, Pratyush is now the fourth-most powerful weather research computer in the world, following in the footsteps of counterparts in Japan, USA, and the UK.
Pratyush also singlehandedly moved India¡¯s spot on the world¡¯s top 500 supercomputer list from current no. 368 to the mid 30s.
Pratyush will help better detect monsoon movement
The array is being segmented in two; a 4.0 petaflop machine will be installed at IITM Pune, and a 2.8 petaflops facility at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast in Noida. The Indian government had sanctioned the machine¡¯s development last year for a whopping Rs 450 crore, in order to improve our monsoon forecasting, among other things.
"As a result of added computing power, the number of farmers who receive weather information through text messages is expected to increase from 24 million at present to 45 million by 2019," Union Minister Harsh Vardhan said. In addition, Pratyush's computing ability should also help map regions of the country at a 3 km resolution for weather forecasts.
