Meet Pratyush and Mihir, India’s Two Supercomputers Among the World’s Best

Every year the list of fastest supercomputers comes out. Published by TOP500, the list this year features two supercomputers from India once again. Pratyush and Mihir, the two supercomputers of India, ranked in at 67th and 120th spot on the list. These rankings were announced on June 22 at the ongoing virtual event ISC (International Supercomputing Conference) High Performance 2020 Digital.

The two Indian supercomputers’ rankings, however, has fallen down compared to last year. According to the 2019 rankings, Pratyush supercomputer was in 57th spot whereas Mihir supercomputer’s ranking was 100. The TOP500 list is a project that regularly ranks and evaluates the top 500 fastest supercomputer systems in the world.

Prathush is India’s fastest supercomputer with 3.7 petaflops high performance. The supercomputer is at the Indian Institute of Meteorology, Pune.

For the uninitiated, a petaflop is the measure of a computer’s processing speed. A petaflop is equal to a quadrillion or a thousand trillion calculations per second.

Mihir, which was ranked 120th, had a capacity of 2.5 petaflops. This particularly fast machine is at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast in Noida.

The two supercomputers were installed in 2018 by the ministry of earth sciences. The estimated cost of installing and setting them up was close to Rs 440 crores, according to an earlier report by The Economic Times.

The two supercomputers are used to help the quality of not just weather forecasts like monsoon but also of cyclones, earthquakes and other extreme events. They can also help forecast air quality, flood, drought among other things.

As for the fastest supercomputer in the world, that title was accorded to Fukagu, a Japanese system backed by Fujitsu and RIKEN. For comparison sake, Fukagu had a performance of 415.53 petaflops. The list, otherwise, was dominated by a lot of supercomputers from China and the USA.

Source: Gadgets Now

Image Courtesy:ToI