‘Lightweight’ payments system

GS Paper - 3 (Economy)

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has conceptualised a lightweight payment and settlements system, which it is calling a “bunker” equivalent of digital payments, which can be operated from anywhere by a bare minimum staff in exigencies such as natural calamities or war. The infrastructure for this system will be independent of the technologies that underlie the existing systems of payments such as UPI, NEFT, and RTGS. The central bank has not offered a timeline for the launch of this payments system yet.

Why is such a lightweight payments system needed?

1. In its Annual Report for 2022-23 published on 30 May 2023, RBI says that the lightweight and portable payment system is expected to operate on minimalistic hardware and software, and would be made active only on a “need basis”.
2. Such a lightweight and portable payment system could ensure near zero downtime of the payment and settlement system in the country and keep the liquidity pipeline of the economy alive and intact by facilitating uninterrupted functioning of essential payment services like bulk payments, interbank payments and provision of cash to participant institutions.
3. The system is expected to process transactions that are critical to ensure the stability of the economy, including government and market related transactions.
4. Having such a resilient system is also likely to act as a bunker equivalent in payment systems and thereby enhance public confidence in digital payments and financial market infrastructure even during extreme conditions.

How will the lightweight system be different from UPI?

1. The RBI has said that there are multiple payment systems available in the country for use by individuals as well as institutions, each of which has its distinct character and application.
2. According to the RBI, existing conventional payments systems such as RTGS, NEFT, and UPI are designed to handle large volumes of transactions while ensuring sustained availability. As a result, they are dependent on complex wired networks backed by advanced IT infrastructure.
3. However, catastrophic events like natural calamities and war have the potential to render these payment systems temporarily unavailable by disrupting the underlying information and communication infrastructure. Therefore, it is prudent to be prepared to face such extreme and volatile situations.

New petaFLOP supercomputers

GS Paper - 3 (IT and Computer)

India will unveil its new 18 petaFLOP supercomputer for weather forecasting institutes later this year, Union Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju said on 24 May 2023. The new supercomputer is expected to improve weather forecasts at the block level, help weather scientists give higher resolution ranges of the forecast, predict cyclones with more accuracy and better lead time (the difference between a phenomenon being forecast and actually occurring), and provide ocean state forecasts, including marine water quality forecasts.

Why Supercomputers for Weather forecasting?

1. Presently, we give forecasts with a 12-kilometre resolution. The new supercomputer will improve it to six-kilometre resolution. Our aim is to achieve one-kilometre resolution forecasts, Ministry of Earth Sciences Secretary M Ravichandran said.
2. Making the announcement after a visit to the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida, Rijiju said that the supercomputer will cost Rs 900 crore.

What are FLOPs in computing?

1. FLOPs or Floating-Point Operations per Second is a commonly used metric to measure the computational performance – processing power and efficiency – especially in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).
2. Floating-point operations are a certain kind of mathematical calculation using real numbers with fractional parts.

How many FLOPs can a computer achieve?

1. Modern computing systems, such as CPUs (Central Processing Units) and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), are designed to perform multiple operations simultaneously, using parallel processing techniques.
2. The parallelism significantly increases the number of FLOPs a system can achieve within a given time frame. Over the years, hardware has become more efficient, exponentially increasing computing power.
3. For instance, in 1961, the IBM 7030 Stretch, costing a whopping $ 7.8 million at the time, performed one floating-point multiplication every 2.4 microseconds, roughly performing 417,000 FLOPs.
4. A PlayStation 5 today is listed to have a peak performance of 10.28 TFLOP, i.e. 10.28 trillion FLOPs.

What is a petaFLOP?

1. Due to the immense computing power of today’s computers, the FLOPs metric is most often represented in terms of billions (giga), trillions (tera), or even quadrillions (peta) of operations per second (GFLOPs, TFLOPs, PFLOPs, respectively).

China’s Manned mission to Space Station

GS Paper - 3 (Space Technology)

China launched a spacecraft carrying three astronauts, including its first civilian, to its Tiangong space station. This is the country’s fifth manned mission to a fully functional space station since 2021. The Shenzhou-16, was launched atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert in northwest China.

What is the new mission about?

2. The three astronauts will replace the crew of Shenzhou-15 aboard the Tiangong space station, who have been there since November last year.
3. The new crew will stay there for the next five months and will carry out “large-scale in-orbit tests and experiments in various fields as planned.
4. They are expected to make high-level scientific achievements in the study of novel quantum phenomena, high-precision space time-frequency systems, the verification of general relativity, and the origin of life.

What is the Tiangong space station?

1. Operated by China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), the Tiangong space station was built by China after the USA barred NASA from working with the Asian country, citing a high risk of espionage.
2. The permanently inhabited space station’s first module entered orbit in 2021 and two more modules were added to it in the following years.
3. The Tiangong space station, expected to become the sole in-orbit outpost for scientific research after the end of operations for the International Space Station in 2030, is China’s ambitious project to achieve its space dreams.
4. The country has already announced its plan to expand it, “with the next module slated to dock with the current T-shaped space station to create a cross-shaped structure,” as per Reuters.