7/1/2018
PUNE: Union
Minister of Earth Sciences Dr. Harsh Vardhan today dedicated India’s fastest
and first multi-petaflops supercomputer to the nation. The supercomputer named
as ‘Pratyush’ meaning the Sun, established at the Indian Institute of Tropical
Meteorology (IITM), Pune, will be a national facility for improving weather and
climate forecasts and services under the umbrella of the Ministry of Earth
Sciences (MoES), Govt. of India.
While inaugurating the facility, Dr. Harsh Vardhan said that
it will be India’s number one HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and
performance. India needs better forecasts for Weather and Climate conditions
like monsoon, extreme events, Tsunamis, Cyclones, earthquakes, air quality,
lightning, fishing, hot/cold waves, flood/drought, etc. Some highlights of the
services provided by MoES institutes to the country are:
Best weather/climate prediction
system in terms of accuracy/skill for monsoon climate.
Operational forecasts at a very
high resolution of 3 km at regional scale and 12 km at global
scale for weather forecasts at par with any other leading weather/climate forecast
center in the world.
Fastest Tsunami alert/advisory
to the stakeholders in Asia/Pacific region.
Advisories on Potential fishing
Zones, operational ocean wave/weather watch forecasts and air quality
forecasts, climate projections are provided regularly to the citizens of India MoES
also plays leadership role in South Asian region by providing more accurate weather/climate
forecasts to its neighboring countries.
To provide all such forecast and prediction services, we need
to run computer models on high performance computing (HPC) facilities. HPC
constitutes one of major basic infrastructural requirements to run the various
forecast models. To provide more accurate and reliable forecasts, we need to
constantly increase our computational (HPC) power. MoES has set up high
resolution weather and climate dynamical coupled forecast systems for providing
reliable forecasts and is constantly working in this direction to increase our
HPC power.
Constantly augmenting its High Performance Computing
infrastructure at regular intervals is mandatory to keep MoES abreast with new
technologies and to be at par with other leading weather/climate/ocean service
centers worldwide.
In last 10 years, the HPC infrastructure at MoES institutes
has grown from 40 Tera flops in 2008 to 1 Peta flops in 2013/14. As a result of
providing HPC infrastructure to MoES scientists,
in addition to its constant research activities, MoES stands tall in the
international weather and climate sciences community and constantly endeveours
to provide the best services to the country and the Neighborhood.
Presently, with around 1.0 PF peak capacity, India’s ranking
in HPC is much below the HPC rankings of major countries that generate
weather/climate forecasts. With the augmentation of this new 'Pratyush' high
performance computing (HPC) facility of 6.8 Peta Flops (PF), India’s ranking
will move from the 368 th position to around the top 30 in the Top 500 list of HPC
facilities in the world.
Our improved forecast systems and increased HPC capacity has
helped to provide reliable forecast services. For example, better prediction of
seasonal, extended range short and media range predictions of monsoon,
prediction cyclones like “Phailin”, “HudHud”, and the recent one “Ockhi” with
adequate lead time, Tsunami warnings, extreme events like Uttrakhand floods,
Kashmir floods, Bombay/Gujarat extreme rainfall events last year, etc.
The HPC facility inaugurated at IITM will be used for carrying
out research on improving weather and climate forecasts and its applications.
This MoES HPC facility will also be utilized by other MoES institutes (like
INCOIS, IMD, NIOT, NCAOR, NCESS) for research activities to improve their
respective weather and climate services.
The facility is
expected to improve the following services:
Improved weather forecasts at
block level over India which can predict extreme weather events.
High resolution
seasonal/extended range forecasts of active/break spells of Monsoon. Very
high resolution coupled models for prediction of cyclones with more
accuracy and lead time.
Improved Ocean state forecasts
including marine water quality forecasts at very high resolution.
Tsunami forecasts with greater
lead time.
Air quality forecasts for
different smart cities
Climate projections at very
high resolution.
This increase in supercomputing power will go a long way in
delivering various societal applications committed by MoES. This will also give
fillip to research activities not only in MoES but also in other academic
institutions working on various problems related to Earth Sciences.
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