Minister for Earth Sciences Kiran Rijijo is allegedly angry with French IT company Atos. The reason is said to be a delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by the French company. Indian weather forecasting agency. According to a report by news agency PTI, Ministry of Earth Sciences It ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from Atos Group’s French firm Eviden last year to boost the computing capabilities of its institutions – the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am more worried because the target we set was December. The Union Cabinet has already approved the purchase of supercomputers. We have only four petaflop capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflop capacity,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
I said that the French company was having some financial trouble and wanted the government to pay its subsidiary.
The minister says the delay is “bothering” him
Rijiju said the delay has caused him a lot of trouble as the company has overshot the timeline. “But I think we will resolve it soon,” he said, adding that the government wanted to be “very precise in its position legally”.
“We are ready to release the money because we need the machine immediately. The only problem is that the money is not small. So if we pay now, if the company goes bankrupt or something happens, who will bail out,” the minister said.
Rijiju added that the government is taking some steps to speed up the delivery of supercomputers but did not elaborate. “But I hope 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 commodity, we want to make sure that the transaction is done properly,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. It’s just a problem with the main company. They want us to pay their subsidiary. We will only pay the company with which we have an MoU,” Rijiju said.
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 IITM Pune-based supercomputer 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 powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum Infinity-Band Networking Platform for in-network computing, 3PB all-flash and 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage and Micron High Technology memory.
The current computing facility at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and 4 petaflops at IITM respectively.
