New Parliament to house sceptre that symbolised transfer of power in 1947

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi will install the Sengol, a sceptre given by the British to India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to represent the transfer of power in 1947, in the new Parliament building.
• Sengol — derived from the Tamil word “Semmai”, meaning “Righteousness”, according to an official document — the sceptre is a “significant historical” symbol of Independence as it signifies the transfer of power from the British to the Indians
• It was originally used to mark the handing over of power from one king to another during the Chola dynasty in Tamil Nadu.

Why was the Sengol given to Nehru?

• According to the official document, just before Independence, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, asked Nehru about “the ceremony that should be followed to symbolise the transfer of power from British to Indian hands”.
• The soon-to-be prime minister went to consult C Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India, who told him about a ceremony performed during the Chola dynasty, in which the transfer of power from one king to the other was sanctified and blessed by high priests.
• The five-foot-long intricately carved, unbending gold-plated silver sceptre, with a finial of Nandi (bull deity), was specially commissioned by the then Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam (pontiff) and was handed over to Nehru.
• The Sengol ceremony seemingly took place minutes before India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru hoisted the National Flag and made his famous “Tryst with destiny” speech on August 15, 1947. It had been kept at his Prayagraj residence-turned-museum till now.
• It was found to have been widely reported in Indian and foreign media at that time including in the Time magazine along with photographs.

Manipur tribal body calls for separation of hill areas in the State

• A tribal leaders’ forum in Manipur has sought the “total separation” of the hill areas inhabited by the indigenous people, primarily those belonging to the Kuki-Chin-Zomi-Mizo group, from the State.
• The ITLF further sought protection against two armed radical Meitei groups — Arambam Tenggol and Meitei Leepun — in the border areas of the tribal habitations by neutral forces. Holding these groups responsible for the killing of tribal people and the destruction of their houses, the forum said they needed to be stopped.

Won’t let anyone mar India-Australia ties, says PM

At a “joint press statement” event, Mr. Modi announced that India will open a new consulate in Brisbane, and said that the two sides have “decided to focus” on upgrading the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA) to the level of a comprehensive economic cooperation agreement.

Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement

• It is the first Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that India has signed with a major developed country in over a decade.
• The Agreement encompasses cooperation across the entire gamut of bilateral economic and commercial relations between the two friendly countries, and covers areas like:
  • Trade in Goods, Rules of Origin.
  • Trade in Services.
  • Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT).
  • Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures.
  • Dispute Settlement, Movement of Natural Persons.
  • Telecom, Customs Procedures.
  • Pharmaceutical products, and Cooperation in other Areas.
• ECTA provides for an institutional mechanism to encourage and improve trade between the two countries.
• The ECTA between India and Australia covers almost all the tariff lines dealt in by India and Australia respectively.
  • India will benefit from preferential market access provided by Australia on 100% of its tariff lines.
  • This includes all the labour-intensive sectors of export interest to India such as Gems and Jewellery, Textiles, leather, footwear, furniture etc.
  • On the other hand, India will be offering preferential access to Australia on over 70% of its tariff lines, including lines of export interest to Australia which are primarily raw materials and intermediaries such as coal, mineral ores and wines etc.
• Under the agreement, Indian graduates from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) will be granted extended post-study work visas.
  • Australia will also set up a programme to grant visas to young Indians looking to pursue working holidays in Australia.

Significance

• It will provide zero-duty access to 96% of India’s exports to Australia including shipments from key sectors such as engineering goods, gems and jewellery, textiles, apparel and leather.
• It will boost bilateral trade in goods and services to USD 45-50 billion over five years, up from around USD 27 billion, and generate over one million jobs in India, according to a government estimate.
• It will also give about 85% of Australia’s exports zero-duty access to the Indian market, including coal, sheep meat and wool, and lower duty access on Australian wines, almonds, lentils, and certain fruits.

Free Trade Agreements

• It is a pact between two or more nations to reduce barriers to imports and exports among them.
• Under a free trade policy, goods and services can be bought and sold across international borders with little or no government tariffs, quotas, subsidies, or prohibitions to inhibit their exchange.
• The concept of free trade is the opposite of trade protectionism or economic isolationism.
• FTAs can be categorised as Preferential Trade Agreement, Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA), Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA).

India set to triple speed of its fastest supercomputers

• India is set to dramatically scale up its supercomputing prowess and install an 18-petaflop system over the course of this year
• Flops (floating point operations per second) are an indicator of processing speed of computers and a petaflop refers to a 1,000 trillion flops. Processing power to such a degree greatly eases complex mathematical calculations required, for, among other things, forecasting how the weather will be over the next few days all the way up to two or three months ahead.
• Currently India’s most powerful, civilian supercomputers — Pratyush and Mihir — with a combined capacity of 6.8 petaflops are housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Noida, respectively.

Imported from France

• The new supercomputers, yet to be named, are imported from French corporation, ATOS — an information technology service and consulting company. India had signed a deal in December 2018 with France to procure high-performance computers worth ₹4,500 crore by 2025.
• The new MoES computers are likely to cost ₹900 crore.
• The fastest high-performance computing system in the world is currently the Frontier-Cray system at Oakridge National Laboratory, United States. This has a peak speed of one exa-flop (or about 1,000 petaflops).

History of Supercomputers in India

• Supercomputing in India began in 1980 when the Indian government set up an indigenous development programme as there were several issues to procure supercomputers from abroad.
• The National Aerospace Laboratories started the project “Flosolver MK1“, a parallel processing system operating in December 1986. Following this, multiple projects were commissioned from different organisations, including C-DAC, C-DOT, NAL, BARC, and ANURAG.
• C-DOT created “CHIPPS”, the C-DOT High-Performance Parallel Processing System, and BARC created the Anupam series of supercomputers. ANURAG created the PACE series of supercomputers.
• Although the C-DAC mission released the “PARAM” series of the supercomputer, it was only in 2015 that the launch of the National Super Computing Mission boosted the Indian supercomputers. NSM announced a seven-year programme worth Rs 4,500 crore to install 73 indigenous supercomputers by 2022.

PARAM SERIES

• PARAM is a series of supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune. (Started in 1987 1987).
• PARAM means "supreme" in the Sanskrit language, whilst also creating an acronym for "PARAllel Machine".
• The fastest machine in the series is the PARAM Siddhi AI which ranks 89th in world with an Rpeak of 5.267 petaflops.

1. PARAM 8000: The first machine built from scratch unveiled in 1991.
2. PARAM 8600
3. PARAM 9000
4. PARAM 10000
5. PARAM Padma: The first Indian supercomputer to enter the Top500 list of supercomputers in the world, it ranked 171 in June 2003.
6. PARAM Yuva
7. Param Yuva II
8. PARAM ISHAN
9. PARAM Brahma
10. PARAM Siddhi-AI- ranked 63 among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Supercomputers under the National Supercomputing Mission:

1. PARAM Shivay
2. PARAM Sanganak
3. PARAM Pravega
4. PARAM PORUL

About Supercomputer

• A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer because its architectural and operational model depends on the parallel and grid processing.
• Primary motive to design of supercomputer was to be used in large scale organizations where need more computing power.
• Supercomputer has a power to execute many processes simultaneously on thousand of processors, because these types of processors can execute billions and trillion of instructions per seconds, so its computing performance matrix is FLOPS (that is floating-point operations per second).
• The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Supercomputers were started in 1960s.

The first supercomputer was designed by Seymour Cray in 1960 in Control Data Corporation (CDC)

Petaflop

• A petaflop is the ability of a computer to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS).
• Floating-point numbers have decimal points in them. The number 2.0 is a floating-point number because it has a decimal in it. The number 2 (without a decimal point) is a binary integer.
• Specific to floating-point numbers, a floating-point operation is any mathematical operation (such as +, -, *, /) or assignment that involves floating-point numbers (as opposed to binary integer operations).

Petascale

• Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS).
• Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system to reach this milestone was the IBM Roadrunner in 2008.

Categories of Supercomputers

• The supercomputer has to divide into three categories such as Vector processing machines, tightly connected cluster computer and in finally commodity computer.

1. Vector processing machines: This machine was invented in 1980 to 1990s. In which arrange the all processor in the array form, and its CPU is capable to execute all huge mathematically operations in a few time.
2. Tightly connected cluster computer: In these types of system, connect all groups of computers and assigned the task to all group equally so the reason of this clustering enhanced the speed of computer. There are four types of cluster like as Director-based clusters, Two-node clusters, Multi-node clusters, and massively parallel clusters.
3. Commodity Cluster: In this system, high-bandwidth low-latency local area networks were interconnected by the Commodity computer.

Applications

• Supercomputers have a wide variety of applications such as weather forecasting, aerospace engineering, automobile crash and safety modeling, quantum physics, physical simulations, molecular modeling, oil and gas exploration, defense applications and many more.
• Other applications include virtual reality, computational chemistry, finance, transportation, etc.

There are many application areas where to use of supercomputer such as

Biology Areas

• Mostly, supercomputer used to diagnose for various diseases, and provide the assistance for producing good result in strokes, brain injuries and other blood flow issues in your body

Military and Defense Missions

• Supercomputing help to provide virtual testing for nuclear explosion and weapon ballistics

Climate Patterns

• Supercomputer application is able to study and understand climate patterns.

Airlines Industry

• With the help of supercomputer, designed the flight simulators for newbie pilots and this simulator help to training for new pilots.

Weather Forecasting

• To gather the information related to weather forecasting, supercomputer run in the NOAA’s system, means National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA system is able to execute all types of simple and logically instructions.

Scientific Research areas

• In the weather and science research areas depend on the supercomputer because for analyzing data from the exploring solar system, satellites that rounding earth, and other area such as nuclear research.

Advance database (Data Mining)

• Some large scale companies need the supercomputer for extracting useful information from data storage house or in the cloud system. Such as insurance companies.

Financial Market Place

• Supercomputer plays vital role in the real financial success in the emerging online currency world such as bit coin and stock market

Simulated Environment in Automobile

• Supercomputer provides the help to people for buying vehicle because before purchasing the vehicle customer can test through simulation environment that is created by supercomputer.

Smog Control System

• Scientists use supercomputers in own laboratory for predicting the fog and other pollution level on the particular areas, and then take final step to prevent them.

India’s National Supercomputing Mission

• The National Supercomputing Mission was launched in 2015 for over a period of seven years.

Development and Implementation

• The Mission is being jointly steered by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
• It is being implemented by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc),

Objectives

• To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
• To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains
• To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing
• To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology