France-based IT firm Atos has been chosen to build the supercomputers under India’s Rs 4500 crore National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). This is a three-year contract and Atos would be making use of its energy-efficient Direct Liquid Cooled BullSequana supercomputers.
The tender to build these high-performance computers (HPC) had been floated by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in February this year. It has been stated that the contract was for all three phases of the NSM which would be running simultaneously.
“In Phase I, we will be assembling three supercomputers at an outlay of Rs 68 crore. In Phase II, it will be an aggregate of 10 petaflop, but the number of computers is yet to be decided,” Hemant Darbari, director-general, C-DAC said.
Atos has a major presence globally in the high performance computing (HPC) business under the Bull brand. In September, it launched its most powerful supercomputer with a computing power of 12 Petaflops in Germany, making it the country’s most powerful supercomputer, coming in at number 16 on the recently released Top500 supercomputer rankings.
Also, the company has a supercomputer and server design center in Bengaluru, which will work closely with C-DAC on subsequent phases of the project.