Kiren Rijiju: Why Earth Science Minister Rijiju Is Upset With This European IT Company |

Minister of Earth Sciences Kiren Rijiju It is reported that he is upset with the French IT company Atos. The reason is said to be the delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by the French company Indian Institutes of Weather Forecasting. According to a report by news agency PTI, the Ministry of Earth Sciences had ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from the French firm Eviden, of the Atos group, last year to improve the computing capabilities of its institutions: the National Center 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 the purchase of the supercomputer. We have only four petaflops of capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflops,” Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.
He said the French company had financial problems and wanted the government to pay its subsidiary.
Minister says delay is causing him ‘concern’
Rijiju said the delay has caused him a lot of concern as the company has gone over schedule. “But I think we will solve it soon”, he said, adding that the government wanted to be “very correct in our legal position”.
“We are ready to release the money because we want the machine immediately. The only problem is that the amount is not small. So if we pay now, if the company is bankrupt or something happens, who will bail out,” said the minister.
Rijiju further added that the government was taking some steps to speed up the delivery of the supercomputer, but did not elaborate. “But I hope that the French government will also intervene because we have a good understanding and a very good relationship with the French government.
“Because it’s a high-cost piece of equipment, we want to ensure that the transaction happens properly and correctly,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. It’s only the parent company’s problem. They want us to pay their subsidiary. We will only pay a company with which we have signed an MoU,” said Rijiju.
The supercomputing system, based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH2000, is said to have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops.
Supercomputer at IITM
IITM Pune’s supercomputer will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for atmosphere and climate research. According to the PTI report, it will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes with 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 of Micron high-tech memory and disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage.
The existing computing facility at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and IITM is 4 petaflops, respectively.