India got its first supercomputer during Rajiv Gandhi’s time in Mausam Bhawan for weather forecasting. Three decades later, with that becoming outdated, plans are afoot to buy another one for helping gauge impact of climate change. This would be a machine that will simulate changes in water, temperature and rainfall for the next 100 years by solving more than 10 million equations in a few seconds.

Early this week, a meeting was organised by R Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Prime Minister, to finalise a national plan for adapting to climate change. One of the things that the PSA proposed was buying or building a supercomputer to help India make more informed decisions.

As India sets out to draw its first roadmap to combat impacts of this change, large holes in India-specific data on impact of climate change is obvious. Current model simulations give one degree latitude and one degree longitude, which are too coarse for planning. This idea was proposed in the first meeting of the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change held this month.

According to experts, the supercomputer will be of 100 teraflops, costing approximately Rs 30-35 crore. This would be a huge technological leap from the 10 teraflops of the Param series already existing in India. Though modules can be added to it, the outcome can be skewed results, explained scientists. There are 25 such computers in the world.

“Climate change is a grand challenge. These challenges push the frontiers of the computing to a new level,” said N Balakrishnan of the Indian Institute of Science who is being consulted by the PSA on this. He is confident that India has the capacity to build its own supercomputer.

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