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

Minister of Earth Sciences: Kieron Rijiju It is reported that French IT company Atos. The reason is said to be the French company’s delay in delivering two supercomputers to: 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 the supercomputer. We only have 4 petaflops of capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflops of capacity,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
He said the French company was experiencing some financial difficulties and wanted the government to pay its 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 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 good understanding and a good relationship with the French government.
“Because it’s a high-cost piece of equipment, we want to make sure the transaction happens properly and normally,” 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 a memorandum of understanding with us,” Rijiju said.
The supercomputing system is based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000 and is said to have a combined 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. As per the PTI report, it will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processor and 26 GPU nodes via NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with in-network compute, 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.