When we think of supercomputers, we forget how crucial they are to help us live a better life with their gargantuan processing power.
Top500 is a global institution that keeps a track of such powerful supercomputers across the globe. Last year, it picked two supercomputers — Pratyush and Mihir (ranked at 45 and 73 respectively), however this year they’ve updated their list and looks like they’ve managed to retain their spot in the top 100.
Pratyush ranked at 53 whereas Mihir is now ranked at 100. While they’ve lost their positions from last year, considering tech across the globe is evolving at an exponential pace and better processing hardware comes out every year, they’re still some really fast machines.
Pratyush is installed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune. The supercomputer is equipped with a 4.0 petaflop array of processors dedicated to weather and climate analysis. In case you didn’t know, a petaflop is a measure of a supercomputer’s processing speed, meaning it can perform one quadrillion floating-point operations per second or FLOPS. For Pratyush, multiply that measure by 4.0. In simpler terms, it’s blazing fast!
Mihir, on the other hand, is installed at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Noida. It is capable of churning out 2.8 PetaFlops, which might seem like a little underpowered against Pratyush but is still a performer nonetheless.
Costing a massive Rs 450 crore, both these systems are based on the Cray XC40 supercomputer. They’re running on arrays of Intel Xeon processors and Nvidia’s Now you might be wondering what would a supercomputer really do that a normal computer cannot.
Essentially the massive processing power in these two systems allows for lots of data to be analysed simultaneously — whether it is related to rain patterns or earthquakes, air quality and other weather conditions — something that a standard computer would take months or years to figure out.
Pratyush and Mihir are essentially HPCs or High Performance Computing facilities which made India the fourth country in the world to have an HPC facility dedicated for weather and climate research after Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom.
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