Minister of Earth Sciences Kiren Rijiju is reported to be concerned with French IT company Atos. The reason is said to be a delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by a French company Weather forecasting institutes of India. This was reported by PTI news agency Ministry of Earth Sciences Last year, France’s Atos Group ordered two $100 million worth of supercomputers from Eviden, which will be used by its institutes — the National Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (NCMRWF) and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am more upset because our target was December. The Union Cabinet 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 the French company was having some financial problems and wanted the government to pay its subsidiary.
The minister says the delay has caused him “concern”.
Rijiju said the delay bothered him a lot because the company was running behind schedule. “But I think we will resolve it soon,” he said, adding that the government wanted to be “very correct in our position from a legal point of view.”
“We are ready to release the money because we want the car immediately. The only problem is that the amount is not small. Therefore, if we pay now, if the company goes bankrupt or something happens, who will take the collateral,” said the minister.
Rijiju further added that the government is taking some steps 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 this is a high-value piece of equipment, we want to ensure that the operation is done properly and properly,” he said.
“Everything is ready from the outside. It is only a problem with the parent company. They want us to pay their subsidiaries. We will only pay the company with whom we have signed an MoU,” said Rijiju.
Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000-based supercomputing system is said to have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops.
Supercomputer at IITM
The supercomputer at Pune-based IITM will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for atmospheric and climate research. According to a PTI report, it will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with inline computing, 3PB of all-flash and 29PB of disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 memory, and Micron high-tech storage.
The available computing facility at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and 4 petaflops at IITM respectively.
