India's fastest supercomputer established at Pune's IITM

Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan dedicated India's fastest and first "multi-petaflops" supercomputer to the nation here.

Petaflops is a measure of a computer's processing speed.

Christened "Pratyush", meaning the sun, the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility has been established at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and will be a national facility for improving weather and climate forecasts, an IITM release said.

While inaugurating the facility, the minister said that it would be India's number one HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and performance.

The IITM release added that the facility would help the country with better forecasts in terms of monsoon, extreme events, tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes, air quality, lightning, fishing, hot and cold waves, flood and drought among others.