French outfit Eviden bags $100 mn weather modelling supercomputer projects in India from NCMRWF

Eviden, an Atos Group business with an annual revenue of €5 billion, said it has been awarded a $100 million contract by NCMRWF (the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, a Centre of Excellence in Weather and Climate Modelling) on behalf of the India Ministry of Earth Sciences, to build two new supercomputers dedicated to weather modelling and climate research for the Indian Institute of Technology–Madras and NCMRWF.

The NCMRWF supercomputer, to be located in Noida, would have an 8.3-Petaflop computing capacity for weather and climate modelling to support advanced numerical weather research across the country, said Eviden in a statement.

The platform would bring together 2,100 CPU nodes with AMD EPYCTM 7643 processors, 18 GPU nodes using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, the NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking platform, and high-performance memory provided by Micron. NCMRWF supercomputer will also have 2PB all flash and 20PB disk based DDN EXAScaler ES400NVX2 parallel filesystem storage, as per the communique.

Dr. M. Ravichandran, Secretary, 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.”

These two systems, based on Eviden’s supercomputing platform, BullSequana XH2000, would have a combined power capacity of up to 21.3 Petaflops and would rely on Eviden’s patented Direct Liquid Cooling technology to cool the system using warm water, the French firm further said.