Petaflops computer in the offing in India

Syed Akbar
Hyderabad, Nov 24: India is working on a high power super computer
with petaflops power, which is 1000 times more powerful than the
existing teraflops computer. It will be ready during the 12th
five-year plan, according to Dr R Chidambaram, principal scientific
advisor to the government of India.

Flops is a measurement of the power of a computer. A teraflops
computer has a processing speed of a trillion floating-point
operations per second. A petaflops computer is 1000 times more
powerful i.e. it can handle one thousand trillion floating-point
operations per second.

Dr Chidambaram was delivering the inaugural address at the 22nd annual
conference of Indian Nuclear Society. He said a draft technology map
identifying thrust areas for research and development will be ready by
December 1.

Dr S Banerjee, chairman of Atomic Energy Commission, who also
participated in the conference, told reporters that the ground level
data work on the proposed super nuclear power station at Kovvada in
Srikakulam had been completed. “We have completed the baseline survey.
A detailed geo-technical study was also over. We are yet to start the
reactor-specific investigations at Kovvada,” he said.

Referring to the controversy surrounding the Kudankulam nuclear power
plant, Dr Banerjee hoped that they would win over the hearts of
people. “It has plenty of safety features to remove the decay heat in
case of mishap. There’s gravitational system for flow of water to cool
the plant if something goes wrong.” He also allayed the fears of the
local people that there would be high radiation at the site and the
livelihood of the fishermen would be affected.

ECIL chairman YS Mayya, Indian Nuclear Society secretary Dr RK Singh,
Prof P Rama Rao, president of Indian Nuclear Society, and others were
present. INS Homi Bhabha Lifetime Achievement Award was given to
eminent nuclear scientist Dr Baldev Raj. The society also presented
young engineer awards, outstanding service awards, science
communication award and industrial excellence award.