On 26th September 2024, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi dedicated 3 ‘PARAM Rudra’ Supercomputers worth Rs 130 crore to the nation via video conferencing. These supercomputers are developed indigenously under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
- These supercomputers have been deployed in New Delhi(Delhi), Pune(Maharashtra) and Kolkata(West Bengal, WB) to provide pioneering scientific research.
- The development of these supercomputers is in alignment with PM’s commitment to make India self-reliant in the field of Supercomputing technology.
Key Functions:
i.Pune based Giant Metro Radio Telescope (GMRT) will leverage the supercomputer to explore Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and other astronomical phenomena.
ii.New Delhi based Inter University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) will enhance research in fields like material science and atomic physics.
iii.Kolkata based S.N. Bose Centre will promote advanced research in areas such as physics, cosmology, and earth sciences.
Note: The Government of India (GoI) has announced a research fund of Rs 1 lakh crore in the Union Budget for Financial Year 2024-25 (FY25).
About NSM:
i.It was announced in 2015 as a joint initiative of Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
- Aim: To connect national academic and Research and Development (R&D) institutions with a grid of over 70 high-performance computing facilities.
ii.It is being implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISC), Bengaluru(Karnataka).
iii.The estimated cost of the mission is Rs 45,00 crore over a period of 7 years.
PM Inaugurated HPC System Tailored for Weather and Climate Research
On 26th September 2026, PM Narendra Modi inaugurated a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system tailored for weather and climate research, acquired by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES).
- This project is developed with an investment of Rs 850 crore, marking a significant step in India’s computational capabilities for meteorological applications.
- The MoES aims to improve the precision and reliability of weather forecasts through these advanced HPC systems, which will ensure better preparedness and response to climate change.
About HPC System:
i.The new systems are located at Pune(Maharashtra)-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and Noida(Uttar Pradesh, UP) based National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF).
- The IITM system has capacity of 11.77 Peta Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS) and storage of 33 petabytes(PB).
- While, the NCMRWF facility has capacity of 8.24 Peta FLOPS and storage of 24PB.
ii.These new state-of-the-art systems are named ‘Arka’ and ‘Arunika’ after celestial entities connected to the sun, the main energy source for the Earth system.
- Previous systems were named Aditya, Bhaskara, Pratyush, and Mihir.
Significance:
i.The HPC system will help the MoES to enhance its total computing power from the previous capacity of 6.8 Peta FLOPS to 22 Peta FLOPS.
ii.It will enable the development of sophisticated models using advanced technologies like: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), thus, improving the last-mile services rendered to various stakeholders.
iii.It will allow the MoES to enhance its existing data assimilation capabilities and refine physics and dynamics of its global weather prediction models at higher horizontal resolution.
- Also, the regional models will achieve finer resolutions of 1 kilometer (km) or less over select Indian domains. These models will significantly improve the accuracy and lead time of predictions related to tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation, thunderstorms, hailstorms, heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather phenomena.
About Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES):
Union Minister- PM Narendra Modi (Constituency- Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, UP)
Minister of State (MoS)(Independent Charge) – Dr. Jitendra Singh (Constituency- Udhampur, Jammu and Kashmir, J&K)
