Kiren Rijiju, the minister of earth sciences, is apparently not happy with the French IT corporation Atos. The delay in the French company’s supply of two supercomputers to Indian weather forecasting institutes is cited as the cause. The National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) are two of the Earth Sciences Ministry’s institutions that will benefit from the $100 million supercomputers that the French company Eviden, part of the Atos Group, ordered last year.
“The fact that December was our aim makes me much more angry. Purchasing the supercomputer had already been approved by the Union Cabinet. Our capability is limited to four petaflops. In a video interview with PTI, Rijiju stated, “We intend to deploy up to 18 petaflop capacity.
According to him, the French corporation encountered financial difficulties and requested payment from the government to its subsidiary.
The minister claims that he is “worried” about the delay.
Rijiju stated that the corporation has beyond the timetable, and the delay has worried him greatly. He continued, saying that the administration wished to be “very correct in our position legally” and that “but I think we will sort it out soon.”
“We need the machine right away, thus we are prepared to release the funds. The sum is not negligible, which is the main issue. Thus, the minister responded, “If we pay now, who will bail out if the company goes bankrupt or something else happens?”
Rijiju continued, saying that the government was moving to expedite the delivery of the supercomputer, but he did not provide any details. However, given our excellent understanding and connection with the French government, I hope they will also step in.
“Since it is a high-cost equipment, we want to ensure that the transaction happens duly and properly,” he stated.
“Everything appears ready from the outside. Only the primary corporation is the issue. They demand that we pay their affiliate. Only businesses with whom we have signed an MOU will receive payment,” Rijiju declared.
The supercomputing machine is said to have a total power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops and is based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000.
IITM’s supercomputer
The IITM supercomputer in Pune will supply 13 petaflops of processing power for
research on the atmosphere and climate. It will integrate 26 GPU nodes utilizing NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 CPUs, according to the PTI report. The NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with In-Network Computing, 3PB all-flash and 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage, as well as Micron high-technology memory, will all be advantageous to the system.
At NCMRWF and IITM, the current computing capacity is 2.8 and 4 petaflops, respectively.