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By Sunderarajan Padmanabhan

The Ministry of Earth Sciences is all set to have the third best computing facility in the entire world with the induction of next generation supercomputer with a capacity of 15 petaflop in the next six months. Disclosing this, Minister for Earth Sciences Harsh Vardhan, said, “the process of procurement of the high performance computer is already under way. It should be installed and commissioned by November this year.”

Addressing a press conference in New Delhi on Tuesday, he said that with the new facility, India would enter into new frontiers in modelling activities with specific applications on severe weather, urban meteorology and ocean services. He noted that the computing facility had already been augmented substantially by upgrading the capacity to 1,000 Teraflop or 1.1 Petaflop. Consequently, there has been a paradigm shift in weather and climate modelling activity for operational weather forecast.

The Ministry, he said, was also in the process of acquiring a polar research vessel so as to give a new thrust to its polar science programme. The tender for the vessel will be floated by the end of this year and it is likely to be ready in three years. Further, the national seismological network under the National Centre for Seismology has been upgraded to 84 digital observatories to enable an earthquake of magnitude greater than three on the Richter scale anywhere in the country to be located within five minutes.

At present, the second phase of the upgradation programme is underway involving setting up of 32 new stations and updgradation of six existing ones. This will short the time taken for earthquake location further to a mere three minutes. The second phase is also expected to be completed by the end of the year. In addition, the Ministry, he said, was working to expand the scope of weather forecast to the administrative block levels, which is a level above panchayats. To begin with, forecasts will be available for 100 blocks by the end of this year. The rest of the administrative blocks will be covered by 2019.

India Science Wire