Earth Sciences Minister Rijiju upset over delay in supercomputer delivery by French firm

New Delhi: Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju is upset over the delay in the delivery of two supercomputers by a French firm to Indian weather forecasting institutes and hopes that the French government will step in to hasten the process.

The Earth Sciences Ministry had ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from French firm Eviden, of the Atos Group, last year to better the computing capabilities of its institutions -- the National Centre 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 purchasing the supercomputer. We have only four petaflop capacity. We want to install up to 18 petaflop capacity," Rijiju told PTI in a video interview.

He said the French company ran into some financial trouble and wanted the government to make payment to its subsidiary.

Rijiju said the delay has caused him lots of worry as the company has overshot the timeline. "But I think we will sort it out soon," he said, adding that the government wanted to be "very correct in our position legally."

"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 said the government was taking some steps to speed up the delivery of the supercomputer but did not elaborate.

"But I hope the French government will also intervene because we have a good understanding and a very good relationship with the French government. 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 systems, based on Eviden's BullSequana XH2000, will have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 petaflops.

The NCMRWF supercomputer will have an 8.3-petaflop computing capacity for weather and climate modelling to support advanced numerical weather prediction (NWP) research.

This platform will bring together 2,100 CPU nodes with AMD EPYC 7643 processors, 18 GPU nodes using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform, and high-performance memory provided by Micron.

The NCMRWF supercomputer will also have 2PB all flash and 20PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 parallel filesystem storage.

The supercomputer at the Pune-based IITM will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for atmosphere and climate research.

It will integrate 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes through 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 disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage and Micron high-technology memory.

The existing computing facility at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and at IITM is 4 petaflops, respectively.