India’s Supercomputing Capabilities:
As per the global ranking service of super-computers (Top 500), India has only 3 top-ranked supercomputers among 500 and none in the top 100.
- (Param Siddhi (5.27 PFlops), Param Ganga (1.66 PFlops) and Pratyush supercomputer (Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology’s))
- India had 2 in the top 100 in 2020
- World: China and the US account for nearly two-thirds of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.
- Frontier Supercomputer: The world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, offers a peak performance of 1,685 PFlops.
Benefits of Supercomputers:
- High-speed computation: E.g., in May 2020, IBM’s Summit supercomputer, helped researchers find drug compounds that could stop the covid-19 virus from infecting host cells in just 2-3 days.
- Other areas: chemistry formulations, protein folding, biomedicine, space (for satellite placements) and climate research.
