The Hindu Editorial Vocabulary– May 30, 2023; Day 434

Faster, stronger: on India and its supercomputer use

India must use its supercomputers beyond weather forecasts 

Later this year, India will have a new ‘supercomputer’ or, more correctly, an upgraded ‘high performance computing (HPC)’ system that will arguably be its fastest. This system is to be made and installed by the French corporation, Atos — an information technology service and consulting company. The Narendra Modi government signed a deal in December 2018 with France to procure (Get by special effort) high-performance computers worth ₹4,500 crore by 2025. These HPC systems will run at two institutions, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida, that currently host two of India’s most powerful such machines, Mihir and Pratyush. Like their predecessors (Something that precedes and indicates the approach of something or someone), the Atos machines will be used primarily to run sophisticated (Ahead in development; complex or intricate) weather models that, for some years now, are being used to prepare a range of forecasts, from long-term monsoon to fortnightly as well as daily weather changes. Extremely powerful machines are needed for this purpose as accurate forecasts are premised (to base something) on being able to simulate the state of the atmosphere and oceans. ‘Supercomputers’ is a buzzword (a word or phrase, especially one connected with a particular subject, that has become fashionable and popular) and term that is in constant flux (In constant change). Supercomputers of two decades ago are today’s student laptops and gaming consoles.

While many challenging research questions, apart from weather modelling, are extremely dependent on computing — protein biology, aerospace-modelling applications, and now AI-linked applications — the possession of HPCs is also used as a medallion (A large medal) by countries wanting to signify their technological prowess (A superior skill that you can learn by study and practice and observation). The Top 500 project has for over two decades maintained a list of the top 500 most powerful HPC machines and this is updated twice a year, with countries prominently advertising the presence of their systems if they make it to the list. Currently, a machine housed at Pune’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) is the only Indian machine in the top 100 with a top speed of 13 petaflops ((computing) a unit for measuring the speed of a computer system, equal to one quadrillion floating-point operations a second). Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) are an indicator of computer processing abilities and 1 petaflop is a 1,000 trillion flops. The to-be installed French machines are expected to be 18 petaflops and India already has a handful (A small number or amount) of machines at multiple research institutions in the petaflop range. The possession of powerful supercomputers is certainly a reassurance that Indian scientists, wanting to solve intractable (difficult to manage) problems, can always tap these behemoths (Someone that is abnormally large and powerful), but whether the use of these machines has translated into significant breakthroughs (Making an important discovery) in fundamental science or engineering commercial products is another matter. Much like India has improved its short-term weather forecasts and made cyclone forecasts more accurate on the back of such machines, there should be greater accounting of their worth in other fields, rather than be content with epithets (a descriptive word or phrase added to or substituted for a person’s name) of speed and power.

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