Context: According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), India is set to dramatically scale up its super-computing prowess and install an 18-petaflop system over the course of this year.

• The most important details are that India's most powerful supercomputers, Pratyush and Mihir, with a combined capacity of 8 petaflops, are housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF).

• These supercomputers were made operational in 2018 at an investment of Rs 438 crore and will be housed at the IITM and NCMRWF

• India's AI Supercomputer ‘AIRAWAT’, which has been installed at C-DAC Pune, has been ranked 75thin the world in the 61st edition of Top 500 Global Supercomputing List at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) in Germany.

About AIRAWAT (AI Research, Analytics and knowledge Assimilation) 

• It is an AI-based cloud computing infrastructure.

• The system is installed under National Program on AI by Government of India.

• AIRAWAT, manufactured by Netweb Technologies, runs on the Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS operating system.

• It is powered by the high-performance AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz processor, which boasts a massive 81,344 cores.

• This cutting-edge supercomputer was recently installed, showcasing India's dedication to technological progress.

• This platform will assist in the R&D of new technologies which will in turn help in solving business and governance use cases. AIRAWAT is based on the recommendations of the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (NSAI), which has identified areas that are hampering the growth potential of AI in India.

Significance

• Given the fact that India’s AI computing is mostly dependent on vendors such as Microsoft Azure and AWS, AIRAWAT will provide the platform for not only specialized computing but also building infrastructures that will help the computing needs of innovation hubs and other research centers.

• Such a platform will address concerns related to data privacy and place India in the international map of AI.

Trivia

• The AIRAWAT PoC of 200 AI Petaflops integrated with PARAM Siddhi – AI of 210 AI Petaflops gives a total peak compute of 410 AI Petaflops Mixed Precision and sustained compute capacity of 8.5 Petaflops (Rmax) Double Precision.

• The peak compute capacity (Double Precision, Rpeak) is 13 Petaflops.

Imported from France

• The Government of India has signed a deal with France to procure high-performance computers worth Rs 4,500 crore by 2025.

• The new earth-sciences Ministry computers are likely to cost Rs 900 crore and will improve resolution to 6*6 km, meaning four times as many pixels can be used to represent a given area.

• The fastest high-performance computing system in the world is currently the Frontier-Cray system at Oakridge National Laboratory, with a peak speed of 1 exa-flop.

• The top 10 other systems range from 400 petaflops to 60 petaflops.

Additional Facts

• Supercomputers: Supercomputers aggregate the computational power of multiple servers or compute devices for processing huge amounts of data and performing complex calculations.

• Peta flops: A unit of computing speed equal to 1000 million million (1015) floating-point operations per second.