Minister of Earth Sciences Kiren Rijiju He is said to be angry with the The French IT company Atos. The reason is said to be a delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by the French company Indian Meteorological Forecasting Institutes. According to a report in the news agency PTI, the Ministry of Earth Sciences had ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from the French firm Eviden, of the Atos Group, last year to strengthen the computing capabilities of its institutions – the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am more disappointed because the target we set was December. The Union Council had already approved the purchase of the supercomputer. We have only four petaflop capacity. We want to install 18 petaflop capacity,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
He said that the French company had some financial problems and wanted the government to make payments to its subsidiary.
Minister says delay causes him ‘concern’
Rijiju said the delay caused him a lot of worry as the company overshot the timeline. “But I think we will resolve it soon,” he said, adding that the government wanted to be “very correct in our position legally.”
“We are ready to release the money because we want the machine immediately. The only problem is the amount is not small. So if we pay now, if the company is bankrupt or something happens, who will be saved,” said the minister.
Rijiju also added that the government was taking some measures to speed up the delivery of the supercomputer, but did not elaborate. “But I hope that the French government will also intervene because we have a good understanding and a very good relationship with the French government.
“Since it’s a high-cost piece of equipment, we want to make sure the transaction goes smoothly and smoothly,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. It’s just the problem with the main company. They want us to pay their subsidiary. We will only pay a company that we have entered into an MoU with,” said Rijiju.
The supercomputing system, based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000, is said to have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops.
Supercomputer at IITM
The supercomputer at the Pune-based IITM provides 13 petaflops of computing power for atmospheric and climate research. According to the PTI report, it will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes with AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes through NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system benefits from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand network platform with In-Network Computing, 3PB all flash and 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage and high-tech Micron memory.
The existing computing facility at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and at IITM it is 4 petaflops, respectively.
