PETAFLOP SUPERCOMPUTERS

India will unveil 18 new petaFLOP supercomputers for weather forecasting in 2023.
Presently India gives forecasts with a 12-kilometre resolution. The new supercomputer will improve it to six-kilometre resolution.
The ministry of Earth Sciences aims to achieve one-kilometre resolution forecasts.
The new supercomputer is expected to improve weather forecasts at the block level.
It will help weather scientists give higher resolution ranges of the forecast, predict cyclones with more accuracy and better lead time.
Lead time is the difference between a phenomenon being forecast and actually occurring.

How many FLOPs can a computer achieve?

Modern computing systems, such as CPUs (Central Processing Units) and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), are designed to perform multiple operations simultaneously, using parallel processing techniques.
The parallelism significantly increases the number of FLOPs a system can achieve within a given time frame.
Over the years, hardware has become more efficient, exponentially increasing computing power.
In 2008, a supercomputer was able to break what was then called “the petaFLOPS barrier,” when the IBM Roadrunner shocked the world with an astounding peak performance of 1.105 petaFLOPS.
Currently, the world’s fastest computer in terms of PFLOPs is the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5 with the capability to touch a peak performance of 1,685.65.

Are FLOPs the only metric to judge a computer’s performance?

FLOPs is not the only factor determining the performance of a computing system.
Memory bandwidth, latency, and other architectural features also play significant roles.
However, FLOPs provide a valuable baseline for comparing the computational capabilities of different systems.
Is India already using petaFLOPs computers for weather forecasting?
‘Mihir’, a 2.8 petaflop supercomputer and ‘Pratyush’, a 4.0 petaflop supercomputer were launched in 2018.
They will be decommissioned once the new supercomputer is unveiled.
While NCMRWF will be allocated eight PFLOPs computing power, the remaining 10 PFLOPs will go to IITM.

SOURCE: THE HINDU, THE ECONOMIC TIMES, PIB

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