SUPERCOMPUTERS          

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Context:

• Meta announced that it is building an AI supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).
• The RSC is a powerful supercomputer which can perform tasks like translating text between languages and help identify potentially harmful content on Meta's platform.

About:

• A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer.
• The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Supercomputers were started in 1960s.

Petaflop

• A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
• Floating-point numbers have decimal points in them. The number 2.0 is a floating-point number because it has a decimal in it. The number 2 (without a decimal point) is a binary integer.
• Specific to floating-point numbers, a floating-point operation is any mathematical operation (such as +, -, *, /) or assignment that involves floating-point numbers (as opposed to binary integer operations).

Applications:

• Supercomputers have a wide variety of applications such as weather forecasting, aerospace engineering, automobile crash and safety modeling, quantum physics, physical simulations, molecular modeling, oil and gas exploration, defense applications and many more.
• Other applications include virtual reality, computational chemistry, finance, transportation, etc.

India’s National Supercomputing Mission:

Launch

• The National Supercomputing Mission was launched in 2015 for over a period of seven years.

Development and Implementation

• The Mission is being jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
• It is being implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc),

Objectives

• To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
• To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains
• To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing
• To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology

Supercomputers in India:

• India's fastest supercomputer PARAM SIDDHI AI, ranked #62 globally.
• Some other supercomputers of India are: Cray XC40-based Pratyush, Mihir, Param Shivay etc.
• By 2022, the government aims to install 73 indigenous supercomputers across the country.

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