All about super computer and India's Pratyush

Why it was in news?
India unveiled Pratyush, it's fastest supercomputer yet 

Source :The hindu 
www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-unveils-pratyush-its-fastest-supercomputer-yet/article22398732.ece
Fourth fastest dedicated supercomputer in the world 

1. India unveiled Pratyush, an array of computers that will be used for weather and climate research
2. Pratyush is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world dedicated to weather and climate research and follows machines in Japan, USA and the United Kingdom
3. It will also move an Indian supercomputer from the 300s to the 30s in the Top500 list, a respected international tracker of the world’s fastest supercomputers

Pratyush’s prowess

1. Pratyush is an array of computers that can deliver a peak power of 6.8petaflops
2. One petaflop is a million billion floating point operations per second and is a reflection of the computing capacity of a system

Better monsoon forecast

1. A key function of the machine’s computing power would be monsoon forecasting using a dynamical model
2. This requires simulating the weather for a given month — say March — and letting a custom-built model calculate how the actual weather will play out over June, July, August and September
3. With the new system, it would be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3 km and the globe at 12 km

What is super computer 

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A supercomputer 

 is a type of computer which is used to focus the applications that requires large mathematical and difficult calculations at front line of processing capacity is known as Super computer.
It is fastest computer as compared to ordinary computer because supercomputers involve solving advanced scientific problems. Supercomputers supported by high powered graphics workstations, which are extremely valuable resources for a wide range of scientific investigations. Fastest possible performance of such computers made them invaluable in for all types of scientific researches.

Types of super computers


There are two types of supercomputer exist. 
One type has several extremely complex and expensive processors that carry out computations serially, one at a time and the second type has thousands of simple, inexpensive processors connected in parallel to perform the billions of task per seconds.

Applications of Supercomputers:

Due to high speed processing ability of Super computers, there are several applications of such computers which are used in scientific and research woks such as weather forecasting, graphics animation, nuclear research, petroleum research, molecular modeling and crypt analysis etc.
Today, Super computers are widely used in physics, precisely includes physical phenomena such as climate change, energy, environment, weapons, analysis of data such as national security intelligence, behavior of molecules in life sciences, protein folding, genome sequencing and also applicable on different kinds of medical industry.

Two major applications of supercomputers are Missile trajectory simulation and Gypsy moth growth population simulation.

Pros and Cons of Supercomputers:
There are many advantages of super computers which are really important for our daily life but at the same time where these computers have great advantages some disadvantages are also present.

Pros of Supercomputers:
1. They can replace experimentation in the cases where experiments are hazardous, expensive or even impossible to perform or with the help of instruments.
2. Help to design engineered products such as automotives, aerospace, nano-technology, and also new material designs by using up to 10,000 atoms.
3. They are used to calculate and show the conditions, temperature, speed, voltages etc like we might be see in a power plant, traffic control office etc.
4. Their use is of strategic importance to national security and defense, as well as for research and development in many areas of science and engineering.
Cons of Supercomputers:
1. The construction of Supercomputers is an incredibly expensive task because user is charged according to no. of processors.
2. They are not portable and are very specialized.



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