The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has developed an in-house modelling super lab that would ultimately enable better prediction and planning for earthquakes, coastal storms and extreme sea level rise among others. TERI’s supercomputing facility, acquired from Wipro, will place the institute as one of the leading centers for excellence on climate modeling in the subcontinent.
TERI said that a a state-of-the-art supercomputer has been acquired to develop a better understanding of climate variability and climate change. Thus far, there is a lack of institutional capacity in India for generating the right kind of strategic knowledge that can help policy makers make informed decisions to deal with climate change ? a gap the institute wants to plug with the new capability.
? Changing climate, rising seas and extreme weather events have an impact on natural and human systems. To define the nature in which the changes are likely, high end computational resources and scientific expertise is essential. For quantification and understanding of the uncertainties using high resolution global and regional climate models it is imperative to have high performance computing facility,? a spokesperosn from TERI said.
The institute also added that the supercomputer from Wipro would help tailor climate model outputs and link them with the region or location-specific Impact Assessment Models and thereby enable prediction and planning in adverse scenarios.
The supercomputer has 128 cores with quad core processors, 1.5 Tera FLOPS and 16TB parallel file storage. It also has two dedicated linux-based servers to perform regional climate simulations with 2TB online storage facility.
In November 2009, FE reported that China was racing ahead in supercomputing leadership with as many as 41 systems in the world’s top 500 supercomputers and two in the top 10. India, in contrast, continues to lag far behind and has only four supercomputers in the top 500 ? this constitutes less than 1% of the global share.
Most applications that require modeling and simulation need supercomputing clusters. Supercomputers are also required in security applications, in scientific domains like computational fluid dynamics.