Context

Every year the list of fastest supercomputers comes out published by TOP500

In news

Param Siddhi, thehigh performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer established under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at C-DAC has achieved global ranking of 63 in TOP 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world released on 16^th November 2020.

Apart from this another super computer Mihir has been ranked 146th

Significance

• The AI system will strengthen application development of packages in areas such as advanced materials, computational chemistry & astrophysics, and several packages being developed under the mission on platform for drug design and preventive health care system, flood forecasting package for flood prone metro cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Patna and Guwahati. 
• This will accelerate R&D in  war against COVID-19 through faster simulations, medical imaging, genome sequencing and forecasting and is a boon for Indian masses and for start-Ups and MSMEs in particular.
• It is a boon for application developers and will help testing of weather forecasting packages by NCMRWF & IITM, geo-exploration packages for oil and gas recovery; packages for aero-design studies; computational physics and mathematical applications and even online courses for education.

History

Supercomputing in India has a history going back to the 1980s. The Government of India created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign supercomputers.

India had faced difficulties in the 1980s when trying to purchase supercomputers for academic and weather forecasting purposes. In 1986 the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) started the Flosolver project to develop a computer for computational fluid dynamics and aerospace engineering.The Flosolver MK1, described as a parallel processing system, started operations in December 1986.

Supercomputer

The term "supercomputing" refers to the processing of massively complex or data-laden problems using the concentrated compute resources of multiple computer systems working in parallel (i.e. a "supercomputer"). Supercomputing involves a system working at the maximum potential performance of any computer, typically measured in Petaflops. Sample use cases include weather, energy, life sciences and manufacturing.

Source: PIB