What are Airawat, Param Siddhi, Pratyus and Mihir?

Correct — A, Super Computers of India. All four names belong to high-performance computing systems, and between them they cover the two things India uses such machines for. AIRAWAT is the artificial-intelligence system at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune, the fastest machine in the country, with a peak of about 13 petaflops. PARAM Siddhi-AI, also from C-DAC and commissioned in 2020, was built on an Nvidia SuperPOD architecture and entered the global Top500 list at sixty-third place. Pratyush at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune and Mihir at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Noida are the weather and climate pair, Cray XC40 machines of roughly 4 and 2.8 petaflops, and they are what raised the resolution of India's monsoon and cyclone forecasts. The PARAM name is the oldest thread here: it goes back to PARAM 8000 in 1991, built after India was refused a foreign supercomputer, and the line now runs under the National Supercomputing Mission launched in 2015.

• (b)Battle Tanks of India — India's tanks carry a different set of names — Arjun, the indigenous main battle tank, alongside the T-90 Bhishma and the T-72 Ajeya. None of the four in the question is armour.
• (c)Supersonic Missiles of India — The supersonic missile India is known for is BrahMos, with Akash and Astra in adjacent roles. Missile names do not overlap with the computing programme.
• (d)Indian Naval Ships — This is the trap the question is built on, and it is a near miss rather than a wild one. The Navy does operate a landing ship called INS Airavat, spelt with a v, while the supercomputer at C-DAC is AIRAWAT with a w. One letter separates a warship from a machine, and the other three names settle it.

A supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second, and the petaflop scale used here means a thousand million million such operations every second. India's programme has two strands. The scientific and general-purpose strand runs through C-DAC's PARAM series, begun in 1991 after export restrictions blocked the purchase of a foreign machine, and continued under the National Supercomputing Mission of 2015, run by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with the Department of Science and Technology, C-DAC and the Indian Institute of Science. The operational strand belongs to the weather agencies, whose forecasts improve directly with the number of grid points a model can afford to compute.

The paper prints the third name as Pratyus; the machine at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology is Pratyush, and the missing letter is a printing slip rather than a different system. Two lessons sit in this question beyond the four names. The first is that computing power is treated in India as strategic infrastructure — the PARAM programme exists because a machine could not be bought — and the second is that weather forecasting is where the public sees the return: Pratyush and Mihir together let the India Meteorological Department run finer-grained models, and the sharp improvement in cyclone track prediction over the last decade rests on that capacity. Rankings in this field move fast, so treat any position on the Top500 list as a snapshot rather than a fact to memorise.

• AIRAWAT is C-DAC's artificial-intelligence system at Pune and is India's fastest supercomputer, with a peak of about 13 petaflops.
• PARAM Siddhi-AI was commissioned by C-DAC in 2020 and ranked sixty-third in the world when it entered the Top500 list.
• Pratyush belongs to the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, and Mihir to the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida.
• The National Supercomputing Mission was launched in 2015 under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with C-DAC and the Indian Institute of Science.
• PARAM 8000, built by C-DAC in 1991, was India's first indigenous supercomputer and the ancestor of the whole series.

• Reading Airawat as the naval ship Airavat; the spellings differ by one letter.
• Assuming any Sanskrit-named system must be a weapon — the same naming habit runs across missiles, ships, satellites and computers.
• Memorising a Top500 rank; the list is revised twice a year and positions move quickly.

Asked as a four-name identification, where recognising even one machine settles the category and the other three follow.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Pratyush and Mihir, the high-performance computing systems, are used mainly for

  • (a)weather and climate forecasting
  • (b)nuclear weapon simulation
  • (c)satellite launch control
  • (d)census data processing

  Answer(a) weather and climate forecasting — Pratyush is at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and Mihir at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  India's first indigenously developed supercomputer, built in 1991, was

  • (a)PARAM 8000
  • (b)Anupam
  • (c)Aaditya
  • (d)SAGA-220

  Answer(a) PARAM 8000 — developed by C-DAC after India was refused the import of a foreign supercomputer, and the beginning of the PARAM line.