Super Computers are those which have a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance/ speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
Super Computers are mostly used in fields such as Computational Science, Quantum Mechanics, Weather Forcasting, etc.
India, too has some very powerful supercomputers that are being used for a variety of functions. As of 2020, the fastest computers in India are Pratyush and Mihir.
Pratyush
Pratyush is a Cray-XC40 LC [Liquid Cooled] System with 3315 nodes running the Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2695 processors with a peak performance of 4,006 TFLOPS and a total system memory of 414TB. The system is composed of 18 Compute cabinets and uses Cray’s Aries AOC with Dragonfly Interconnect network topology. In addition to this, the system consists of 16 Intel KNL 7210 accelerator nodes with a peak performance of 42.56TFLOPS and a total memory of 1.5TB.
System Information :
Each of the compute node has dual socket and runs Intel Xeon Broadwell E5-2695 v4 18-core processors with a clock speed of 2.1GHz .
The entire system operates on Cray’s customized Linux OS, called Cray Linux Environment. The cluster supports architecture specific compilers from Cray as well as Intel and open-source GNU compilers. The System also hosts architecture specific parallel libraries like OPENMP, MPI, libsci, Intel Cluster software etc. Applications like GFS, WRF, ROMS, CFS are available on the system for weather forecasting. To facilitate users with parallel program development, DDT parallel debugger and profiler is enabled on the system. The system uses PBS Pro as Workload Manager.
Mihir
Mihir was inaugurated by the Ministry of Earth Science (MoES) at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forcasting(NCMRWF), Noida. It has provided the facility to improving weather/climate forecasts. It is country’s largest HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and performance. It also propelled India’s ranking to top 30 in the list of HPC facilities in the world.
Pratyush and Mihir are used in the fields of weather forecasting and climate monitoring in India. 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. 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.
Post a Comment