India's fastest supercomputer "Pratyush" Launched

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The Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan today launched India's fastest and first "multi-petaflops" supercomputer 'Pratyush' at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune. While inaugurating the facility, the minister said that it would be India's number one HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and performance. After launching, he dedicated this supercomputer to the nation.

"Pratyush", meaning the sun, can deliver a peak power of 6.8 petaflops (a measure of a computer's processing speed). In order to deliver a power peak of 6.8 petaflops, the supercomputer extracts 4 petaflops from IITM (Pune) and the remaining 2.8 petaflops from the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF) situated at Noida.

Pratyush is expected to add significantly to the nation's capacity in weather forecasting and climate monitoring and takes India to the fourth position - only behind the UK, Japan, and the USA in terms of dedicated high powered computing resources for weather and climate monitoring.

Pratyush is a part of the efforts made by Ministry of Earth Sciences to grow ‘High Performance Computing’ (HPC) in the country. Presently, India stands at a lower position in terms of HPC infrastructure rankings in the world. With the introduction of Pratyush, India hopes to move from the present 368th position to gain a position in the top 30 in the Top500 list of HPC facilities in the world. 

With this, India will also be placed at the 4th position after Japan, UK, and USA for dedicated HPC resources for weather/climate community.

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