Earth Sciences Minister Rijiju Expresses Frustration Over Atos Supercomputer Delay, Jeopardizing Weather Forecast Upgrades

Kiren Rijiju, the Minister of Earth Sciences, has voiced his frustration with Atos, a French IT company, regarding the delayed delivery of two supercomputers intended for Indian weather forecasting institutions.

The Earth Sciences Ministry placed an order last year for the two supercomputers, valued at $100 million, from Eviden, a subsidiary of the Atos Group. The aim was to bolster the computing capabilities of the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).

Rijiju conveyed his disappointment, stating, "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."

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

The Minister emphasized his concern over the delay, as it has exceeded the initially agreed-upon timeline. He added, "But I think we will sort it out soon," while affirming the government's commitment to maintaining a legally sound position.

"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 said.

Rijiju mentioned that the government is actively working on measures to expedite the delivery of the supercomputer, without providing specific details. He expressed hope that the French government would intervene, given 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 said.

"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," Rijiju said.

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

Supercomputer Specifications at IITM

The supercomputer destined for IITM in Pune will deliver 13 petaflops of computing power for research in atmosphere and climate. According to reports, it will feature 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes through NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The system will 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.

Currently, the computing facilities at NCMRWF and IITM have capacities of 2.8 petaflops and 4 petaflops, respectively.