New petaFLOPs supercomputers will be launched by India in 2023. What are petaFLOPs?

India is going to launch its brand new 18 petaFLOP supercomputer in the year 2023. As stated by Kiren Rajiju, Union Earth Sciences Minister on May 24, these supercomputers will be used for weather forecasting institutes in the country.

Many expectations are placed on the FLOPs as they are expected to enhance weather forecasts at the very block level. These supercomputers are also expected to aid weather scientists provide higher resolution ranges of the weather forecast. Not to miss, these supercomputers will also be helpful in predicting cyclones with the utmost accuracy along with better lead time. Moreover, the FLOPs are also going to offer ocean state forecasts and tell scientists forecasts about marine water quality.

What are FLOPs?

Floating-Point Operations per Second, abbreviated as FLOPs are popularly used metric that is helpful in measuring computational performance- efficiency and processing power, chiefly in walks of high-performance computing (HPC) along with Artificial intelligence (AI).

M Ravichandran, the Ministry of Earth Sciences Secretary made a statement saying,  “Presently, we give forecasts with a 12-kilometer resolution. The new supercomputer will improve it to six-kilometer resolution. Our aim is to achieve one-kilometer resolution forecasts.” The Ministry of Earth Sciences Secretary made a visit to the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, abbreviated as NCMRWF in Noida. He declared that Rs 900 crore will be the cost of the supercomputer.

The Floating-point operations make use of mathematical calculations with the use of fractions and real numbers.

In that sense, how many FLOPs can be achieved by a computer?

Central Processing Units and Graphics Processing Units are some types of modern computing systems that are designed in a way that they are capable of performing myriad operations at the same time, with the help of parallel processing techniques. This concept greatly enhances the number of FLOPs that can be achieved by the system in a given period of time. In the past years, computing powers have increased significantly.

What is meant by a petaFLOP?

Present-day computers hold significantly great computing powers. Thus, the metric of FLOPs is often denoted in giga (billions), tera (trillions), or PETA (quadrillions) of operations per second. These can be denoted as GFLOPs, TELOPs, and PFLOPs, respectively. So what is the metric value of petaFLOP?

A petaFLOP equals a thousand TFLOPs. One can also say that a petaFLOP is equal to 1015 FLOPs.