Aurora Supercomputer

• 20 Mar 2019

The United States has decided to build the fastest supercomputer.

• The supercomputer is named as Aurora.

About Aurora

• It is scheduled to be delivered to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in 2021.
• It will be the first machine to reach a milestone called “exascale” performance, i.e. one billion billion calculations per second.
• This speed is around seven times the speed of the most powerful system built to date, or 1,000 times faster than the first “petascale” systems built in 2008.
• The new machines will let researchers create significantly more accurate simulations of phenomena such as drug responses, climate changes, the inner workings of combustion engines and solar panels.
• An International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation system called Summit(OLCF-4), built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA is the fastest supercomputer in the world with a clocked speed of 143.5 petaflops.

Supercomputer in India

• India’s first supercomputer called PARAM 8000 was launched in 1991.
• At present, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has Pratyush supercomputer, which is the fastest supercomputer in India, it has a speed of 4.0 Petaflops.
• National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting has Mihir, which has a speed of 2.8 petaflops.

Unit of Computing Speed

• Teraflops: It is a unit of computing speed equal to one million million (10^12) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
• Petaflops: It is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (10^15) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
• Exaflops: It is a unit of computing speed equal to one billion billion (10^18) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).