Govt gets deal with Atos for supercomputers

The Government is set to ink a deal with European Information Technology corporation Atos to procure supercomputers for academic and research institutions across India.

The Atos and the C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) – the research and development organisation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology – will sign the contract during French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian's visit to New Delhi on Friday and Saturday, the Ministry of External Affairs stated.

The Atos has its headquarters at Bezons in France.

The C-DAC is going to ink the contract with Atos to rope in the global leader in digital transformation into the National Supercomputing Mission, which the government launched in 2015 to set up a network of 73 high-performance computing facilities at research and academic institutions across the country at an expenditure of Rs 4500 crore over a period of seven years.

The contract would clear the way for the Atos to deploy its BullSequana supercomputers in India to build a network with a cumulative computing power of more than 10 petaflops.

Flops (or Floating Point Operations Per Second) is a unit for the measurement of performance of computers and petaflop is equal to a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

The high-performance computing facilities, which the Atos will deploy in India, will include the corporation's advanced BullSequana XH2000.

Le Adrian will commence his visit to Mumbai from Friday. Apart from calling on Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, he will interact with Indian and French personalities from the film, television and tourism industries. He and his Indian counterpart External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will meet in New Delhi on Saturday. “The two sides will review the broad gamut of the multi-faceted India-France bilateral relations and exchange views on regional and global issues of mutual interest,” Raveesh Kumar, official spokesperson of the MEA, said.

French Foreign Minister will call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday before departing for Paris.