To advance weather and climate research, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune will host a high-performance computing system launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

At an estimated cost of Rs 130 crore, the supercomputers, which were constructed in-house under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), would be installed in Pune, Delhi, and Kolkata to facilitate high-performance scientific research and development.

The 'Arka' and 'Arunika' high-power computing systems are anticipated to yield notable improvements in forecasting accuracy and lead time for tropical cyclones, heavy precipitation, thunderstorms, hailstorms, heat waves, droughts, and other crucial meteorological phenomena.

The current high-power computing systems Pratyush and Mihir, which are housed at NCMRWF in Noida and IITM in Pune, respectively, will be replaced by Arunika and Arka.

With this initiative, which has cost Rs. 850 crore, India's computational capacity for meteorological applications would advance significantly.

These systems, which are based on Eviden's BullSequana XH2000, will use warm water to cool the system and have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 Petaflops. Eviden's patented Direct Liquid Cooling technology will be used in these systems.

The NCMRWF supercomputer, which is situated in Noida, will enable cutting-edge numerical weather research throughout India with its 7.49 Petaflop computing power for weather and climate modeling.

This platform will include the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking architecture, 18 GPU nodes using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, 2,115 CPU nodes using AMD Milan 7643 CPUs, and high-performance memory from Micron.

Additionally, the NCMRWF supercomputer will contain 20PB of disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 parallel filesystem storage and 2PB of all flash storage.

For studies on the environment and climate, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM, Pune) supercomputer will provide 10.7 Petaflops of power.

It will combine 26 GPU nodes with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 3,021 CPU nodes with AMD Milan 7643 CPUs.