India set to triple speed of its fastest supercomputers

India is set to dramatically scale up its super-computing prowess and install an 18-petaflop system over the course of this year, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) Minister Kiren Rijiju said on May 24. Flops (floating point operations per second) are an indicator of computers processing speed and a petaflop refers to a 1,000 trillion flops. Processing power to such a degree greatly eases complex mathematical calculations required, for among other things, forecasting how the weather will be over the next few days all the way up to two-three months ahead. Currently India’s most powerful, civilian supercomputers — Pratyush and Mihir — with a combined capacity of 6.8 petaflops are housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Noida, respectively. They were made operational in 2018 at an investment of ₹438 crore. Both these organisations are affiliated to the MoES.