Context
PM Narendra Modi inaugurated three PARAM Rudra Supercomputers worth ₹130 crore.
About PARAM Rudra Supercomputers
- Deployment: Installed in Pune, Delhi, and Kolkata under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
- Research Areas: These supercomputers will aid research in physics, cosmology, and earth sciences.
- PARAM Series: Several supercomputers like PARAM developed under NSM, deployed in research institutions.
- National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)
- Launch: Government initiative to enhance supercomputing capability for socio-economic growth.
- Objective: To promote indigenous hardware and software for supercomputers.
- Collaboration: Led by MeitY and DST, implemented by C-DAC and IISc.
- Impact: Supports the vision of Digital India and Make in India, and boosts emerging technologies like AI and quantum computing.
About Supercomputers
- Supercomputers perform at the highest operational rates, measured in FLOPS.
- FLOPS: Performance measured in teraflops (trillions of operations per second) or petaflops (quadrillions of operations per second).
- Applications of Supercomputers
- Weather Forecasting and monitoring climate change.
- Space Exploration: Simulations for space missions and orbital mechanics.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) : Processing large datasets for machine learning and deep learning.
- Healthcare & Genomics: Critical in drug discovery, genome sequencing, and biomedical simulations.
- India’s Supercomputers
- PARAM Rudra: Installed in Pune, Delhi, and Kolkata under NSM.
- Pratyush & Mihir: Used for weather forecasting, located at IITM (Pune) and NCMRWF (Noida).
- PARAM Yuva-II: Developed by C-DAC, previously one of the fastest supercomputers in India.
- Top Supercomputers in the World
- Frontier (USA): Fastest supercomputer in 2023, exceeding 1 exaFLOP.
- Fugaku (Japan): Previously the fastest, used in drug discovery and climate modeling.
Source:
TH
Previous Year Question
What is “Virtual Private Network”?
[UPSC Civil Services Exam – 2011 Prelims]
(a) It is a private computer network of an organization where the remote users can transmit encrypted information through the server of the organization
(b)It is a computer network across a public internet that provides users access to their organization’s network while maintaining the security of the information transmitted
(c) It is a computer network in which users can access a shared pool of computing resources through a service provider
(d) None of the statements (a), (b) and (c) given above is a correct description of Virtual Private Network
Answer: (b)
