Supercomputer Pratyush HPC to boost India’s rankings, forecast weather faster

The Pratyush HPC system will be housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, which is under the ministry of earth sciences (MoES).

The country joined the league of the world’s most powerful supercomputers on Monday, with the launch of the Pratyush High Performance Computing (HPC) system that will generate weather and climate forecasts in just one hour.

The Pratyush High Performance Computing system will generate weather and climate forecasts in just one hour. (HT Photo)

The Pratyush HPC system is housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, which is under the ministry of earth sciences (MoES). It will also be hosted at the Noida-based National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) within a few weeks.

“This supercomputer is five times more effective than the existing ones,” said Suryachandra A Rao, project director of Pratyush HPC. HPC systems housed at MoES institutes rose from 40 teraflops in 2008 to one petaflop in 2014. One petaflop denotes 1,000 trillion operations per second. Flop stands for floating-point operations per second.

The Pratyush HPC was inaugrated on Monday. (HT Photo)

Presently, the MoES HPC system occupies the 368th position in the list by Top500 that ranks the fastest 500 computers in the world. The computational capacity of the Pratyush HPC at Pune will be 4 petaflops, and 2.8 petaflops at Noida. With the Rs450-crore project’s total computational capacity at 6.8 petaflops, India will be among the top 30 fastest computers in the Top500 list. As for using supercomputers for weather and climate information, India will occupy the fourth place after Japan, UK and USA.

The Pratyush HPC will improve weather forecasts and extended range forecasts. It will also predict cyclones and tsunami accurately, with more lead time. Scientists said it will help those dependent on agriculture, hydrology and power sectors. “This is a big achievement and a proud moment for India,” said Rao.

“With increasing demand for tailor-made predictions from users such as farmers, we need to improve our strategy which calls for a better computer,” said Madhavan Nair Rajeevan , secretary , MoES.

With the Rs450-crore project’s total computational capacity at 6.8 petaflops, India will be among the top 30 fastest computers in the Top500 list. (HT Photo)

WHAT MAKES PRATYUSH HPC SO SPECIAL
The Rs450 crore project will increase India’s total computational capacity to 6.8 petaflops, which will place it among the top 30 fastest computers in the world, from its current ranking of 368.
It will occupy the fourth place in rankings after Japan, UK and USA as far as using supercomputers for weather and climate information is concerned.
It will improve weather and climate forecasts by reducing the time and increasing the resolution.
It can predict extreme weather events, cyclones, tsunamis with more lead time.
It will help in seismological studies and also provide information on potential fishing zones.

Computational powers of different Met centres in the world:

Country Total Capacity in Petaflops

UK 20.4 PF

Japan 20.0 PF

USA 10.7 PF

Korea 4.8 PF

France 4.4 PF

China 2.6 PF

India 1.0 PF

(Source: Top500)