Context:  

Earth Sciences Minister said that India is set to dramatically scale up its supercomputing prowess and install an 18 petaflop system over the course of this year.

New Supercomputers:

• The new supercomputers, yet to be named, are imported from French corporation, ATOS — an information technology service and consulting company.
• Estimated cost: ₹ 900 crore.
• They will improve resolution to 6X6 km from existing 12X12 km in mapping weather and climate changes thereby translating to greater clarity and more accurate local forecast.

About National Supercomputing Mission (NSM): 

• Launched in 2015, the ambitious Rs 4,500-crore project is led jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Department of Science and Technology.
• Aim: To create a powerful supercomputing capability for the country and offers powerful computational facilities to boost research.
• The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) were entrusted to spreadhead the seven-year mission, ending in 2022. 
• A National Knowledge Network (NKN), a grid, will connect 70 supercomputers across 75 research institutions with over a thousand researchers using this facility.
• In the first phase of NSM, PARAM Shivay, PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti and PARAM Sanganak were deployed at IIT (BHU), IIT Kharagpur, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Research.
• Currently India’s most powerful, civilian supercomputers are Pratyush and Mihir, with a combined capacity of 6.8 petaflops.

Flops (floating point operations per second):

• They are an indicator of processing speed of computers and a petaflop refers to a 1,000 trillion flops. 
• Processing power to such a degree greatly eases complex mathematical calculations required, for, among other things, forecasting how the weather will be over the next few days all the way up to two or three months ahead.

World’s Fastest Supercomputer:

• The fastest high ­performance computing system in the world is currently the Frontier­ Cray system at Oakridge National Laboratory, United States. This has a peak speed of one exaflop (or about 1,000 petaflops).

News Source: The Hindu