Minister of Earth Sciences Kiren Rijiju he is angry French IT company Atos. The reason is said to be a delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by the French company Institutes of weather forecasting in India. According to a report by news agency PTI, The Ministry of Earth Sciences It ordered two $100 million worth of supercomputers from Atos Group’s French company Evid last year to improve its organizations’ computing capabilities — the National Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (NCMRWF) and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am more determined because the target we set was December. The Union Cabinet has 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 had some financial problems and wanted the government to make a payment to its subsidiary.
The minister says the delay is causing “concern”.
Rijiju said the delay has caused him great concern as the company has overshot its timeline. “But I think we will solve it soon”, he said, and the government “wants to be very correct in our legal position”.
“We are ready to release the money because we want the machine right away. The only problem is that the amount is not small. So if we pay now, if the company goes bankrupt or something happens, who will bail out,” said the minister.
Rijiju added that the government was 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-cost piece of equipment, we want to make sure that the transaction happens properly and properly,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. It’s only the parent company’s problem. They want us to pay their subsidiaries. We will only pay a company we have entered into an MoU,” said Rijiju.
Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000-based supercomputing system is said to have a combined power 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 the PTI report, it will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes powered by AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes via NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with network computing, 3PB all flash and 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage and Micron high-tech memory.
The computing facilities at NCMRWF are 2.8 petaflops and at IITM 4 petaflops, respectively.
