Minister of National Science: Kiren Rijiju He says he is upset with French IT company Atos. Because it is said to be late to bring two high-end computers by a French company to: Indian weather forecasting teams. According to a report by news agency PTI, this: Ministry of Earth Sciences ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from the French company Eviden, owned by the Atos Group, last year to improve the computing capabilities of its agencies – the National Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am very disappointed because the target we made was December. The Union Committee has already approved the purchase of high-end machines. We have only four petaflop capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflop capacity,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
He also said that the French company faced a financial crisis and he wanted the government to give money to his company.
The minister says the delay is causing him “concern”.
Rijiju said that the delay has worried him a lot as the company has exceeded the deadline. “But I think we will solve it soon,” he said, adding that the government wanted “more precision in what we did legally”.
“We are ready to release the money because we need the machine immediately, the problem is that the money is not reduced, so if we pay now, if the company goes bankrupt or something happens, who will pay it back,” said the minister.
Mr. Rijiju added that the government is taking steps to speed up the delivery of the computer but he did not say anything. “But I believe that the French government will also intervene because we understand each other and have a very good relationship with the French government.
“Since it is an expensive tool, we want to make sure that the work is done correctly and efficiently,” he said.
“From abroad, everything is ready. It’s just a big company’s problem. They want us to pay their small company. We will pay to the company we have a contract with,” said Rijiju.
The supercomputing system, based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000, is said to have a processing power of up to 21.3 petaflops.
Supercomputer at IITM
The supercomputer at Pune-based IITM will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for space and climate research. According to a PTI report, it will include 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes using 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-technology memory.
The available computing facilities at NCMRWF are 2.8 petaflops and at IITM are 4 petaflops, respectively.
