Kiren Rijiju: Why is the Minister of Earth Sciences Rijiju angry about this European IT company |

Minister of Earth Sciences Kiren Riji is allegedly upset with French IT company Atos. The reason is 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, Ministry of Earth Sciences ordered two $100 million supercomputers from French company Eviden, of the Atos Group, last year to improve the computing capabilities of its institutions — the National Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (NCMRWF) and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
“I am more upset because the target we set was December. The Union Cabinet has already approved the purchase of supercomputers. We have a capacity of only four petaflops. We want to install a capacity of up to 18 petaflops,” Riji told PTI in a video interview.
He said the French company had run into some financial problems and wanted the government to pay its subsidiary.
The minister says that the delay “worries” him
Rijiju said that the delay caused him a lot of worry because the company had exceeded its deadlines. “But I think we will solve it soon,” he said, adding that the government wants to be “legally very correct in our 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 get the money,” said the minister.
Rijiju further added that the government is taking some steps to speed up the delivery of supercomputers, 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 this is an expensive piece of equipment, we want to ensure that the transaction is done properly and correctly,” he said.
“From the outside, everything is ready. The problem is only with the main company. They want us to pay their subsidiary. We will only pay the company with which we signed the Memorandum of Understanding,” 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
The supercomputer at Pune-based IITM will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for atmospheric and climate research. According to a PTI report, it will integrate 3000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes through NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU. The system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform with In-Network Computing, 3PB all flash and 29PB disk DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage and high-tech Micron memory.
The existing computing capacity at NCMRWF is 2.8 petaflops and at IITM 4 petaflops.