Every year, the list of the fastest supercomputers is published. Published by TOP500, this year’s list again presents two Indian supercomputers. India’s two supercomputers, Pratyush and Mihir, placed 67th and 120th on the list. These rankings were announced on June 22 at the ongoing ISC (International Supercomputing Conference) High Performance 2020 Digital virtual event.
However, the rankings of the two Indian supercomputers have fallen compared to last year. According to the 2019 ranking, the Pratyush supercomputer was 57th while the Mihir supercomputer ranking was 100. The TOP500 list is a project that classifies and regularly evaluates the first 500 fastest supercomputer systems in the world.
Prathush is India’s fastest supercomputer with a high performance of 3.7 petaflops. The supercomputer is at the Indian Meteorological Institute in Pune.
For the uninitiated, a petaflop is the measure of a computer\’s processing speed. A petaflop is equivalent to a quadrillion or a thousand billion calculations per second.
Mihir, ranked 120th, had a capacity of 2.5 petaflops. This particularly fast machine is located at the National Center for Medium-Term Weather Forecast in Noida.
The two supercomputers were installed in 2018 by the Ministry of Earth Sciences. The estimated cost of their installation and set up was close to Rs 440 crores, according to a previous report by The Economic Times.
The two supercomputers are used to improve the quality of not only weather forecasts like monsoons, but also cyclones, earthquakes and other extreme events. They can also help predict air quality, floods, drought, among others.
As for the world\’s fastest supercomputer, this title has been awarded to Fukagu, a Japanese system supported by Fujitsu and RIKEN. For comparison, Fukagu had a performance of 415.53 petaflops. Otherwise, the list was dominated by many Chinese and American supercomputers.
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