High-performance computing systems ‘Arka’ & ‘Arunika’ to help IITM in weather, climate research
To boost its computational capabilities to refine the horizontal decision of its international climate prediction fashions, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) has launched ‘high-performance computing’ or HPC. The system tailor-made for climate and local weather analysis acquired by the Ministry of Earth Sciences was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 26.
The improved computational capabilities supplied by this HPC will permit the Ministry of Earth Sciences to refine the horizontal decision of its international climate prediction fashions to a powerful 6 km. Moreover, regional fashions will obtain even finer resolutions of 1 km or much less over choose Indian domains. These high-resolution fashions will considerably improve the accuracy and lead time of predictions associated to tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation, thunderstorms, hailstorms, warmth waves, droughts, and different excessive climate phenomena.
Suryachandra Rao, challenge director-HPC, IITM, stated, “Leveraging these superior HPC sources, the Ministry of Earth Sciences goals to considerably enhance the precision and reliability of climate forecasts, guaranteeing higher preparedness and response to the challenges posed by local weather variability and excessive climate occasions.”
Round ₹850 crore is being invested on this bold challenge, marking a big leap in India’s computational capabilities for extra dependable and correct climate and local weather forecasting, significantly excessive occasions.
The HPC is positioned at two key websites – the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) at Pune and Nationwide Centre for Medium Vary Climate Forecasting (NCMRWF) at Noida. The IITM system is provided with a powerful capability of 11.77 Peta FLOPS and 33 petabytes of storage, whereas the NCMRWF facility options 8.24 Peta FLOPS with 24 petabytes of storage. Moreover, there’s a devoted standalone system for Synthetic Intelligence (AI) and Machine Studying (ML) functions with a capability of 1.9 Peta FLOPS. With this augmentation, the Ministry of Earth Sciences will improve its complete computing energy to 22 Peta FLOPS, a considerable improve from the earlier capability of 6.8 Peta FLOPS.
Consistent with the custom, the state-of-the-art system has been named after celestial entities related to the Solar. Earlier programs had been named Aditya, Bhaskara, Pratyush, and Mihir. The brand new HPC system is aptly named ‘Arka’ and ‘Arunika,’ reflecting its connection to Surya or the Solar, the first power supply for the Earth system. This enhanced computational framework will allow the event of refined fashions leveraging superior applied sciences akin to AI and ML, thereby considerably enhancing last-mile companies rendered to varied stakeholders.
