India’s Fastest Super Computer “Pratyush” unveiled in IITM Pune.

TNPSC Current Affairs - January 2018 by TNPSC Guru 

Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan  unveiled India’s Fastest and First Multi-petaflops supercomputer named “Pratyush” at Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) which is dedicated to weather and climate research.

About Pratyush.

• Pratyush which means Sun, It has the capacity to deliver peak power of 6.8 petaflops. Petaflops is a measure of computer’s processing speed and 1 petaflop is a million billion floating point operation per second.
• It will be dedicated for improving weather and climate forecasts which will help to enhance better forecast of monsoons, tsunami, floods and all other weather and climate related  information.
• This is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world dedicated for weather and climate research, following by Japan, USA and UK.
• Currently the top 5 super computers are  Sunway TaihuLight Wuzi in China topped the list, second fastest is also in China – Tainhe-2 SuperComputer centre, Guangzhou,  third fastest is in Switzerland- Piz daint, Swiss Supercomputing Centre, Fourth is in Japan – Gyoukou, Agency for Marine Earth Science , Fifth fastest is in US – Titan, Oak Ridge National Labouratory