Rs 850-Cr HPC Systems To Support Weather Forecast, Climate Research
Named ‘Arka’ and ‘Arunika’, the systems are located at 2 key sites — the IITM in Pune and NCMRWF in Noida
New Delhi: In a bid to significantly improve the precision and reliability of weather forecast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has inaugurated $850 crore high-performance computing (HPC) systems for weather and climate research, acquired by the Ministry of Earth Sciences.
Named ‘Arka’ and ‘Arunika’, the systems are located at two key sites — the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida.
The IITM system is equipped with an impressive capacity of 11.77 Peta FLOPS and 33 petabytes of storage, while the NCMRWF facility features 8.24 Peta FLOPS with 24 petabytes of storage.
Additionally, there is a dedicated standalone system for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning applications with a capacity of 1.9 Peta FLOPS, informed the Ministry of Earth Sciences. With this, the ministry will enhance its total computing power to 22 Peta FLOPS, a substantial increase from the previous capacity of 6.8 Peta FLOPS.
The government aims to significantly improve the precision and reliability of weather forecast, ensuring better preparedness and response to the challenges posed by climate variability and extreme weather events.