Keen to improve its ability to predict the vagaries of climate change, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) is acquiring a supercomputer to help it crunch numbers from presently available data.
TERI, which calls itself a “dynamic and flexible” organisation, with activities that range from microbiology to global climate change, from smoke-filled rural kitchens to plush corporate boardrooms, and from schoolchildren to heads of state, will acquire what it called Wipro’s “state of the art” super computer.
How the computing firepower aids TERI’s work remains to be seen, though the past may offer some context to the organisation’s decision to future-proof its research ability.
It was a little over a year ago that TERI’s director general Rajendra K Pachauri ran into trouble with international research community for drawing conclusions without primary research data to back up.
Pachauri, also the chair of United Nations body, Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was at the centre of a raging controversy, dubbed ‘glaciergate,’ that questioned IPCC annual report —- approved by Pachauri —- which claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.
The trouble was the IPCC report did not have clear research data, based on which the conclusion was dawn.
On Monday, TERI did admit that the purchase was to address the “significant lack of institutional capacity.”
“India is significantly vulnerable to climate change and there is still a significant lack of institutional capacity in the country for generating the right kind of strategic knowledge that can help policy makers in informed decision making to deal with climate change,” a TERI statement said.
The think-tank, however, declined to share the cost of its new acquisition.
The processing capacity of TERI’s new supercomputer is 1.5 tera flops, relatively low measure when compared to India’s fastest supercomputer Eka, which has a peak processing capacity of 172 tera flops.
The supercomputer will help “enabling prediction, planning, adaptation and mitigation measures in adverse scenarios or in cases of earthquakes, coastal storms, precipitation, and extreme sea-level rise,” a spokesperson said.
It is also significant that TERI decided to buy a supercomputer instead of leasing processing capacity as and when it requires from existing facilities like Computational Research Lab, a Tata Group facility, which maintains Eka or the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, which maintains the PARAM supercomputer.
Experts feel TERI has weighed its options before placing the buy order.
“The organisation would have done an analysis on how often it requires the processing capacity and based on the project requirement if it is not feasible to wait for leased capacity, then it makes sense for them to have in house supercomputing facility,” said professor N Balakrishnan, associate director and head of the Supercomputing Education and Research Centre at Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science, which maintains India’s third-fastest supercomputer.
