The Atos company Eviden has been awarded a $100 million contract by the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) to deliver two supercomputers to the India Ministry of Earth Sciences.
The two supercomputers will have a combined 21.3 petaflops and be used to advance weather modeling and climate research separately by the NCMRWF and India Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
Dr. M. Ravichandran, secretary for India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, said: “Weather and climate research requires massive computing power. This partnership with Atos Group will augment our current capacity to increase resolutions and accuracy of weather forecasts. We look forward to Atos Group in helping us achieve this goal.”
The NCMRWF high-performance computing (HPC) system will be comprised of 2,100 CPU nodes with AMD Epyc TM 7643 processors, 18 GPU nodes using Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs, the Nvidia Quantum InfiniBand networking platform, and high-performance memory provided by Micron, all of which will combine for 8.5 petaflops of computing capacity.
The system will be located in Noida and used for climate and weather modeling, and will also have 2PB all flash and 20PB disk-based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 parallel filesystem storage.
The IITM supercomputer will have 13 petaflops of power used for atmosphere and climate research. The HPC system will be based in Pune and be comprised of 3,000 CPU nodes using AMD Epyc TM 7643 processors and 26 GPU nodes through Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It will also have 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.
In addition to the two supercomputers, Eviden will upgrade the data centers on both sites.
Jean-Philippe Poirault, CEO for big data and security at Eviden, said: “We are honored to support, through this prestigious contract, IITM, and NCMRWF, on behalf of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, in their mission to continuously improve weather modeling and climate research.
“With a very dynamic growth and a high-quality technological ecosystem, India is a key country for the HPC industry, positioning itself as a frontrunner on the market. The expertise of IITM and NCMRWF combined with the experience of Eviden in delivering the most powerful HPC systems designed for Weather Modelling will provide a unique system ready to tackle the most difficult climate research challenges.”
Eviden is an Atos Group business. Atos first announced plans to spin off Eviden in June last year. The brand was officially launched in April 2023 as a €5 billion company that offers advanced computing, cybersecurity, cloud, smart platforms, transformation acceleration, and net zero transformation.
This year has been full of ups and downs for Atos. The UK Government, after awarding its Met Office supercomputer contract to a different supplier paid Atos a £24 million ($29.1m) settlement in January 2023. That same month saw the UK Government procure an Atos quantum simulator for £385,000 ($470,000).
In February 2023, Atos was awarded a $21.5m contract for a 11.4 petaflops supercomputer at the Max Planck Society in Germany. Also in February, the UK Employment Savings Trust ended a £1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) 18-year deal with Atos after just two years reportedly over deadline disagreements.
