Basics
- A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer because its architectural and operational model depends on parallel and grid processing.
- The primary motive for designing supercomputers was to be used in large-scale organizations that need more computing power.
- Supercomputer has the power to execute many processes simultaneously on thousands of processors, because these types of processors can execute billions and trillion of instructions per second, so its computing performance matrix is FLOPS (that is floating-point operations per second).
- The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of a million instructions per second (MIPS). Supercomputers were started in the 1960s.
Uses
- Supercomputers have a wide variety of applications such as weather forecasting, aerospace engineering, automobile crash and safety modeling, quantum physics, physical simulations, molecular modeling, oil and gas exploration, defense applications, and many more.
Supercomputers in India
- India’s fastest supercomputer Param Parvega sports a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops.
- Some other supercomputers of India are Param Siddhi, Cray XC40-based Pratyush, Mihir, Param Shivay, etc.
National Supercomputing Mission
- Launch – 2015
- The Mission is being jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
- It is being implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
- Objectives
- To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
- To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains
- To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing
- To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology