Having two of the world’s top 100 supercomputers in 2020, the country now has none in that bracket, and only three in the top 500, according to a global ranking service for the world’s fastest supercomputers, called the Top 500. goes.
Supercomputers can speed up computation by providing much larger computing power faster than regular machines. In May 2020, researchers from the US Oak Ridge National Lab ran thousands of simulations to find drug compounds that could prevent the COVID-19 virus from infecting host cells. He completed the simulation in just 2-3 days using IBM’s Summit supercomputer.
“Supercomputers can be used for a huge number of things in certain fields like chemistry, protein folding, biomedicine. They can also be used in space for satellite placements, which are very difficult to solve with classical computers, said Nikhil Malhotra, Chief Innovation Officer, Tech Mahindra.
Countries around the world, including India, have been ramping up supercomputing capabilities over the years. This year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has installed four supercomputers at various institutions in the country. Fifteen supercomputers with a total computing capacity of 24 petaflops have been installed in the country since 2015 under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
According to experts, building local supercomputing capabilities will strengthen high-quality research in biomedicine, space technology and climate, which requires high computing power. However, he also pointed out that the available computing power of Indian supercomputers is much less than that of their global counterparts.
India’s first super computer, ultimate 8000was established in 1990. ultimate accomplishment, which provides a peak performance of 5.27 PFlops, was ranked as the 63rd fastest supercomputer in the world when it launched in November 2020, according to the top 500 global ranking service. He has since slipped to the 111th position.
Similarly, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) Pratyush: The supercomputer, which used to be in the top 100, is now ranked 132. Overall, India has three supercomputers in the overall list of top 500. China and the US account for about two-thirds of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, with 173 and 128 of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, respectively.
The computing power of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second, or FLOPS. One petaflop is equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) flops or one thousand teraflops. world’s fastest supercomputer, marginalLocated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, provides a peak performance of 1,685 pFlops.
“The baseline behind every supercomputer is fast performance. The world is moving towards ExaFlops and we are still on PetaFlops,” said Preeti Syal, a technical policy expert working with NITI Aayog. “We are always two years behind. If we keep playing catch-up we will always be behind.”
IITM project director Suryachandra Rao said leaders like China and the US are looking at high-end computing and this is the next milestone that India has to reach. However, he also pointed out that India faces the twin challenge of expanding capacity and creating such resources for more researchers and institutions. He said, ‘This is a step in the right direction.
“The idea at the moment is to enable more and more people to access such resources. Ten years ago, we used to have 1 or 2 systems. Now we are preparing at different places. It will build capacity and will allow more users to use it.”
Rao said earlier weather and climate forecast was the only priority. Now there are many other applications for supercomputing.
But apart from being a super computer, it is equally important to have the latest hardware. Syal mentioned that how India is making these supercomputers or the components used in them is also important to take the performance of supercomputers to the next level.
Creation of more cases is the next challenge for NSM. Syal said the use cases are currently limited. “Globally, most of the usage comes from industry. Instead what we are doing is letting research institutions run it. They will never be able to think in terms of commercialization. These research institutes should also be directly linked with big industrialists.”
Budget is another challenge. Rao said that his institute is working on increasing the capacity of Pratyush. Though, he said, they need at least 150 pLops, they will be able to get around 10-20 pLops due to budget constraints.
Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) did not respond to Mint’s email query till the time of writing. MeitY, a department of C-DAC is responsible for designing, developing and commissioning supercomputers under NSM.