Kiren Rijiju: Why is Earth Sciences Minister Rijiju unhappy with this European IT company?

minister of earth sciences Kieron Rijiju It is reported that French IT company Atos. The alleged reason was the French company’s delay in delivering two supercomputers to India. indian weather forecast agency. According to news agency PTI, Department of Earth Sciences Last year, Atos Group ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from French company Eviden to enhance the computing power of its agencies, the National Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (NCMRWF) and the Meteorological Bureau. Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“What I am more frustrated about is that the target we have set is December. The federal cabinet has approved the purchase of supercomputers. We only have 4 petaflops of capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflops of capacity,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
I said the French company was experiencing financial difficulties and hoped the government would pay the subsidiary.
Minister says delays have him ‘concerned’
Rijiju said the delay worried him because the company was already overshooting its schedule. “But I think we will resolve this issue very soon,” he said, adding that the government wanted to “maintain our position legally”.
“We are ready to release this money because we want this machine immediately. The only problem is that the amount is not small. So if we pay now, who will bail out the company if it goes bankrupt or something happens,” the minister said.
Rijiju further added that the government is taking some measures to speed up the delivery of supercomputers, without elaborating. “But I hope the French government will also step in because we have a very good understanding and a very good relationship with the French government.
“Because this is a high-cost piece of equipment, we want to make sure transactions are done promptly and correctly,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. It’s just a matter of the main company. They want us to pay their subsidiaries. We will only pay companies that have signed a memorandum of understanding with us,” Rijiju said.
This supercomputing system is based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000 and is said to have a comprehensive computing power of up to 21.3 petaflops.
IITM supercomputer
The supercomputer at IITM in Pune will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for atmospheric and climate research. According to the PTI report, it will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes via NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with in-network computing, 3PB of all-flash and 29PB of disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage, and Micron high-tech memory.
The existing computing capabilities of NCMRWF and IITM are 2.8 petaflops and 4 petaflops respectively.