India’s newest and fastest supercomputer, PARAM-Siddhi AI, has been ranked 63rd in the Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Try this MCQ:

Q.The terms Mihir, Param Siddhi and Pratyush are sometimes seen in news are actually:

a)Indigenous Submarines

b)Supercomputers

c)Missiles

d)Satellites

Param Siddhi

• It is a high-performance computing-artificial intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer established under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) at C-DAC.
• It was commissioned by the C-DAC earlier and has been developed in association with chipmaker Nvidia and French IT consulting firm Atos.
• It will help deep learning, visual computing, virtual reality, accelerated computing, as well as graphics virtualization.
• The computer is expected to be used as a platform for academia, scientific research, startups and more.

Other Indian supercomputers

• PARAM-Siddhi is the second Indian supercomputer to be entered in the top 100 on the Top500 list.
• Pratyush, a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, ranked 78th on the November edition of the list.
• It was ranked 66th in the June rankings announced by the project.
• Another Indian supercomputer, Mihir (146th on the list), clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing power to match PARAM-Siddhi.

Who topped the rankings?

• The Top500 project tracks the most powerful supercomputers in the world and is published twice a year.
• Japanese supercomputer Fugaku (442 petaflops) and IBM’s Summit (148.8 petaflops) are the two most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to the list.
• Chinese Sunway TaihuLight is number four on the list (93 petaflops), developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) in China.

Back2Basics:

National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

Petaflop

• A petaflop is a measure of a computer’s processing speed and can be expressed as A thousand trillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) A thousand teraflops.
• In computing, floating-point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
• For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

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