India to have its fastest supercomputer ‘Airawat’ by March next year

In another remarkable feat, India is going to acquire its fastest supercomputer within a year's time. The AI-based supercomputer, christened as 'AIRAWAT', will cost around Rs 900 crore and is expected to become operational by March next year.

AIRAWAT, which has been ranked 75th in the world, will be installed at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune. The ranking was declared at the 61st edition of the Top 500 Global Supercomputing List at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany.

Tweeting about this stupendous development, newly appointed Union Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju apprised about the weather monitoring mechanism which comes with the highest resolution of probabilistic forecast.

This colossal success of India's tech journey has put India on top of the AI Supercomputing nations worldwide. The system is installed under the 'National Program on AI' of Government of India.

Deliberating on the development, Rijiju explained that the supercomputer can improve forecasting from 12 to 6 km. India's fastest supercomputer at present is the Cray XC-40 supercomputer 'Mihir' with a performance of 6.8 petaFLOPS. The minister informed that the new supercomputer will have nearly thrice the capability.

Praising C-DAC, Rijiju said the facilities at the world class centre in Pune will benefit all sectors and all sections of the society, pointing out that every individual is going to get the benefit directly from this institution.

Meanwhile, talking about AIRAWAT, Union Electronics & IT Secretary Alkesh Sharma said that AI is the most promising technology in the digital age. He also informed about India's strong ecosystem and competitive advantage with regard to AI. This advantage is also due to India's massive data availability, strong digital economy and skilled workforce, he added.

It is noteworthy here that India has been working in the Applied AI with focus on Natural Language Processing, Image Procession, Pattern Recognition, Agriculture, Medical Imaging, Education, Health Care, Audio assistance, Robotics and developing solutions for the strategic sectors.

Nevertheless, India's weather forecasting capabilities are improving very fast. In recent years, the country has made significant advances in the application of science and technology. Now, India is extending weather forecasts capabilities to countries in the neighbourhood and beyond.