Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju is reportedly upset with the French IT company Atos. Reason is stated to be delay within the supply of two supercomputers by the French company to Indian climate forecasting institutes. According to a report in information company PTI, the Earth Sciences Ministry had ordered two supercomputers price $100 million from French agency Eviden, of the Atos Group, final 12 months to reinforce the computing capabilities of its establishments — the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am more upset because the target we set was December. The Union Cabinet had already approved purchasing the supercomputer. We have only four petaflop capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflop capacity,” Rijiju advised PTI in a video interview.
He stated that the French company bumped into some monetary bother and needed the federal government to make cost to its subsidiary.
Minister says that the delay is inflicting him “worry”
Rijiju stated that the delay has precipitated him a number of fear because the company has overshot the timeline. “But I think we will sort it out soon,” he stated, including that the federal government needed to be “very correct in our position legally”.
“We are ready to release the money because we want the machine immediately. The only problem is the amount is not small. So if we pay now, if the company is bankrupt or something happens, who will bail out,” the minister stated.
Rijiju additional added that the federal government was taking some steps to hurry up the supply of the supercomputer however didn’t 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 it is a high-cost gear, we wish to be sure that the transaction occurs duly and correctly,” he said.
“From exterior, every part’s prepared. It is solely the issue with the principle company. They need us to pay their subsidiary. We pays solely to a company whom now we have entered an MoU with,” Rijiju said.
The supercomputing system, based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000, is said to have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops.
Supercomputer at IITM
The supercomputer on the Pune-based IITM will present 13 petaflops of computing energy for ambiance and local weather analysis. As per the PTI report, it can combine 3,000 CPU nodes utilizing AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes by means of NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will profit 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-technology reminiscence.
The present computing facility at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and at IITM is 4 petaflops, respectively.