Minister of Earth Sciences Kiran Rijiju It is said that he is dissatisfied with French IT company Atos. The French company is reportedly delaying the delivery of two supercomputers Indian Meteorological Institute. According to a report by news agency PTI, the Ministry of Earth Sciences Last year, the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and its institutions ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from Eviden, a French firm belonging to the Atos Group, to boost its computing capacity. Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am very disappointed because we had set a target of December. The Union Cabinet has already approved the procurement of supercomputers. We have only four petaflop capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflop capacity,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
He said the French company was in some financial trouble and the government wanted to pay its subsidiary.
The minister says the delay is “concerning” him
Rijiju said the delay caused him a lot of concern as the company had overshot the timeline. “But I think we’ll sort it out soon,” he said, adding, “The government wants to be absolutely right on our position legally.”
“We are ready to give the money because we need the machine immediately. The problem is that the amount is not small. So if we pay now, who will bail if the company goes bankrupt or something happens,” the minister said.
Rijiju added that the government has taken some steps to speed up the delivery of supercomputers but elaborated. “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-cost instrument, we want to ensure that transactions are done properly and accurately,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. It’s only a problem with the main company. They want us to pay their subsidiary. We will only pay a company with whom we have an agreement,” 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 supercomputer at IITM, Pune 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 with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with in-network computing, 3PB all flash and 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage and Micron high-tech memory.
The existing computing facility at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and IITM is 4 petaflops.