Delay in India Super Computer Delivery by French Firm

Technology News ,India :-  India's Earth Sciences Minister, Kiren Rijiju, is upset with a French IT company called Atos. The reason for his frustration is that the delivery of two supercomputers to Indian weather forecasting institutes, ordered from this company, is being delayed.

Last year, the Earth Sciences Ministry decided to enhance the computing capabilities of its institutions – the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). They ordered two supercomputers worth $100 million from a French firm called Eviden, which is part of the Atos Group.

In an interview with news agency PTI, Minister Rijiju expressed his disappointment. He mentioned that the target for receiving the supercomputers was December, but the delivery has been delayed. The Union Cabinet had already approved the purchase of these supercomputers. Currently, the institutions have only a computing capacity of four petaflops, but they aim to install up to 18 petaflops for better forecasting accuracy.

Rijiju explained that the French company faced financial difficulties and requested the government to make payments to its subsidiary. This delay worries him greatly as it has exceeded the agreed timeline. However, he expressed hope that the issue would be resolved soon. The government wants to ensure that all legal aspects are correctly addressed before making any payments.

The Minister also mentioned that steps were being taken to expedite the delivery process, although he didn't provide specifics. He expressed confidence in the relationship between India and France, hoping that the French government would intervene to resolve the matter.

Highlighting the importance of the transaction's integrity due to its high cost, Rijiju emphasized that payments would only be made to the company with which they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

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

The supercomputer at IITM, located in Pune, will provide 13 petaflops of computing power for atmosphere and climate research. It will consist of 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD EPYC 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes equipped with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Additionally, the system will benefit from the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform, 3PB all-flash, 29PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 storage, and Micron high-technology memory.

Currently, the existing computing facility at NCMRWF stands at 2.8 petaflops, while at IITM, it's 4 petaflops.

India First Super Computer :

India's first supercomputer was the PARAM 8000, developed in 1991. It achieved speeds of around 5 Gigaflops (Gflops). This was a significant accomplishment at the time, as it placed the PARAM 8000 among the world's fastest supercomputers.

The PARAM 8000 was a major milestone for India's technological development, demonstrating the country's ability to design and build its own high-performance computing systems.

World Most Powerful Super Computer :

The world's most powerful supercomputer as of today, March 14, 2024, is Frontier. It's located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA. Frontier  achieved a mind-boggling speed of 1.194 exaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark.  An exaflop is equal to one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) floating-point operations per second, making Frontier incredibly fast for complex calculations.