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Journalism of Courage
Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan dedicated India’s fastest and first ‘multi-petaflops’ supercomputer to the nation here. Petaflops is a measure of a computer’s processing speed.
Christened ‘Pratyush’, meaning the sun, the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility has been established at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and will be a national facility for improving weather and climate forecasts, an IITM release said. While inaugurating the facility, the minister said that it would be India’s number one HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and performance.
The IITM release added that the facility would help the country with better forecasts in terms of monsoon, extreme events, tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes, air quality, lightning, fishing, hot and cold waves, flood and drought among others. This facility will also be used in coordination with the Indian Meterological Department (IMD) and other weather monitoring institues, to evolve better weather monitoring practices and an improved weather forecasting system.
This is India’s second HPC unit. The first unit, installed at National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Noida, assist weather agencies in providing daily forecasts. These supercomputers will help weather analysis reach international standards, and attain improved predictions and warnings of natural disasters.
