Minister Rijiju Voices Frustration Over Delayed Supercomputer Delivery from French Firm Atos

Kiren Rijiju, the Minister of Earth Sciences, is reportedly dissatisfied with Atos, a French IT company, due to delays in the delivery of two supercomputers destined for Indian weather forecasting institutes.

According to a report by PTI, the Earth Sciences Ministry placed an order last year with Eviden, a subsidiary of the Atos Group, for two supercomputers valued at $100 million. The aim was to enhance the computing capabilities of 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 stated in a video interview with PTI.

He further explained that the French company encountered financial difficulties and requested the government to make payments to its subsidiary.

Minister's Concern Over Timeline

Rijiju expressed his "worry" about the delay, noting that the company has exceeded the agreed-upon timeline. "But I think we will sort it out soon," he added, emphasizing the government's commitment to maintaining a "very correct in our position legally".

The minister clarified, "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?"

Government Seeks Intervention

Rijiju mentioned that the government is taking steps to expedite the delivery of the supercomputer, though he did not provide specific details. He also expressed hope that the French government would intervene, citing the strong relationship between the two countries.

"Since it is a high-cost equipment, we want to ensure that the transaction happens duly and properly," he stated.

He added, "From outside, everything's ready. It is only the problem with the main company. They want us to pay their subsidiary. We will pay only to a company whom we have entered an MoU with."

Supercomputer Specs

The supercomputing system, based on Eviden's BullSequana XH2000, is expected to have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops.

Supercomputer at IITM

The supercomputer intended for the Pune-based IITM will deliver 13 petaflops of computing power for research related to atmosphere and climate. According to the PTI report, the system will feature 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes through NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will also utilize 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 current computing capacity at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops, while IITM has a capacity of 4 petaflops.