It is crucial for India to leverage its supercomputers for tasks other than weather forecasting.
India is set to acquire a new high-performance computing (HPC) system, developed by French company Atos, making it the country's fastest supercomputer. The Indian government had signed a deal with France in 2018 to procure 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. These machines will primarily be used for advanced weather modeling, crucial for accurate long-term and daily forecasts. While supercomputers are also essential for various research areas such as protein biology, aerospace modeling, and AI applications, possessing powerful HPCs is considered a symbol of technological prowess.
The Top500 project maintains a list of the most powerful HPC machines globally, and India's current top machine ranks within the top 100. The new French machines are expected to operate at 18 petaflops, and India already has several petaflop-range machines. However, there is a need for greater evaluation of the impact of these machines in fields beyond weather forecasting and acknowledgment of their potential in driving breakthroughs in fundamental science and engineering.
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