Council of Scientific and Industrial Research
National Aerospace Laboratories
Flosolver Parallel Computers
Pioneering customised Parallel computer development
CSIR-NAL
CSIR-NAL built India’s first parallel computer, Flosolver Mk 1, in 1986. The current Flosolver Mk8 is a
customised parallel supercomputer for numerical weather prediction using in-house developed
communication devices, under the NMITLI programme of CSIR. The objective of this programme is to build an
integrated Hardware-Software modeling platform consisting of 10 Teraflops, 1024 processor parallel
supercomputer and Varsha GCM.
Flosolver Mk8 – A 10 TFLOPs Parallel computer
Each block consists of
- 4 servers
• Intel SR1530CLR
• Dual Intel Xeon Quad core,
2 GHz/12 MB/1333 MHz
• 8 GB FB DIMM RAM with 667 MHz
• 160 GB SATA HDD
• Slim combo drive
- 4 PCI cards
- 1 FPGA based FloSwitch
Proprietary Floswitch and PCI interface cards are pluggable to any system having a PCI interface and supports a
subset of standard MPI functions. This is first of its kind in India.
FloSwitch
This customised, re-configurable FloSwitch is developed for integrated local and
global communication. It is based on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, having four 64 bit
parallel interfaces and 16 optical channels. Each parallel interface delivers a
throughput of 512 MBps. Each optical channel is full-duplex and delivers a
throughput of 3.125 Gbps.
PCI interface card
The PCI card interfaces the Intel server with the FloSwitch and operates
at 64 bit/66 MHz, delivering maximum throughput of 512 MBps.
Meteorological computing
Flosolver communication system
Parallel computer design
and development
1024 processors grouped as 128 blocks (clusters)
Meteorological computing
Prediction of monsoon onset
Tropical Cyclone Prediction
Monsoon onset for 2010
ons
et
Varsha GCM could predict the onset of Indian Summer
Monsoon accurately two weeks in advance. The figures
represent the FS onset prediction for monsoon 2010
and pattern of weekly average wind during normal
monsoon onset.
Prediction of All India rainfall
Thane: 25 – 30 DEC 2011
Predicted on 28 DEC 2011
MUIFA: 26Jul – 09 Aug 2011
Predicted on 13, 19 Jul 2011
The tracks of tropical cyclones across the globe, are
predicted well by the Varsha GCM. Two cases, one in
the Bay of Bengal and another in the north-west Pacific
ocean are shown in the figure above.
Wind power forecasts
Parallel computer design
and development
The Varsha GCM is helpful in predicting the large scale
wind flow, seasonal reversal of the wind, etc in
advance.
Meteorological computing
Prediction of All India rainfall, a month in advance,
using the Varsha GCM, is one of the strengths of the
Flosolver group. The Flosolver forecasts have been
successful in getting the sign (excess/deficit) right for
most of the monsoon months. The trends in rainfall:
active to break and break to active , also have been
predicted well. These forecasts are sent in advance to
MoES. A sample of the 2009 monsoon forecasts and
verification with observations is shown in the figure
above.
Studies also show that the short term forecast of wind
variations at specific locations using Varsha GCM agrees
reasonably well with that of observations. This
capability of the model can be utilized for the nowcasting of wind/power in the renewable energy sector.
A sample comparison result is shown in the figure
below.
Comparison of KREDL observation and Varsha's wind
forecast: Aug2010
Site - Chalageri, Karnataka
Lat: 14.55deg N, Lon: 75.73deg E
Varsha weather predictions are available at:
http://floweather.nal.res.in/weather/index.html
For more information please contact:
Director, CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratories, PB 1779, HAL Airport Road, Bangalore-560017, India.
Tel: +91-80-25086000, 25270584; Fax: +91-80-25260862; E-mail: [email protected]; www.nal.res.in