Two Indian supercomputers have been featured among the Top 100 in the global Top 500 supercomputers ranking. However, both these rank lower than where they were in the earlier listing published in June this year.
Pratyush at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune ranks at number 45 against 39 in the June listing, while Mihir at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Noida ranks at number 73 against 66 last time.
These are supposed to help improve the quality of forecasts in terms of monsoon, extreme events, cyclones and earthquakes, as well as air quality, lightning, fishing, hot and cold waves, flood and drought, among others. There are two other Indian entries in the Top500, a Lenovo machine at a software company at 338, and at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) at 486.
This is the 52nd edition of the Top 500 list, with five US Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputers in the top 10 positions, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Two supercomputers from China and one each from Switzerland, Japan and Germany make up the rest of the Top 10 list.
Pratyush, the 4.O Peta flops (PF) high performance computer is India’s fastest supercomputer. A petaflop is a measure of a computer’s processing speed and is equal to a quadrillion (thousand trillion) calculations per second.