NEW DELHI, October 21 — The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) commissioned two state-of-the-art High-Performance Computing (HPC) supercomputer systems named 'Arka' and 'Arunika' on Tuesday, expanding India’s meteorological computational capacity to 21.3 PetaFLOPS.
Installed at a capital outlay of ₹850 Crore, the 11.77 PetaFLOP 'Arka' system is housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, while the 8.24 PetaFLOP 'Arunika' cluster operates at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida. Replacing the previous-generation 'Pratyush' and 'Mihir' supercomputers, the liquid-cooled AI-integrated clusters triple the nation's numerical weather prediction speed.
Meteorological scientists confirmed that the computational leap enables the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to upgrade planetary atmospheric models from a 12 km grid to an ultra-high-resolution 3 km and 1 km block-level grid under 'Mission Mausam', vastly improving lead-time accuracy for urban flash floods, tropical cyclone landfalls, and agricultural monsoon advisories.
The institutional ecosystem under the Ministry of Earth Sciences (IMD, IITM Pune, NCMRWF Noida, NIOT Chennai, and INCOIS Hyderabad), the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM developing PARAM Rudra systems), and numerical weather modeling are vital study topics across UPSC Prelims and GS-III.