NEW DELHI: India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and France’s computer major Atos on Saturday signed a three-year contract for the designing, manufacture and installation of Atos’ BullSequana high-performance supercomputers in India.
Worth Rs 4,500 crore, the contract awarded to Atos under the National Supercomputing Mission is spread over seven years and is aimed at creating a network of over 70 high-performance supercomputing facilities for various academic and research institutions across India. The contract was signed in the presence of visiting French foreign affairs minister Jean Yves Le Drian; Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology; Hemant Darbari, C-DAC Director General, and Pierre Barnabé, COO, Big Data & Security, Atos.
The delivery of BullSequana supercomputers is expected to start in early 2019.The French Embassy,
which put out a statement after the signing, said the agreement is of especial importance as “Atos has thus become India’s preferred industrial partner in a highly strategic field” and that the “industrial alliance falls fully under the close relations and strategic partnership between the two countries, which already cooperate, among others, in the sectors of space, civilian nuclear energy, defence and counter-terrorism”.
Speaking at the ceremony, Le Drian said that the agreement would also deepen bilateral ties between the two countries. “India and France have a strategic partnership and we are two nations that innovate a lot. It is true that supercomputers are a necessity and not a luxury. We often say that data for the 21st century is what oil was to the 20th century, we are using data in a massive way and that raises questions of ethics. India and France share not only interests but also values that require us to use technology for the good for humanity,” he said, adding that the two countries ““would like to deepen cooperation in areas of cyberspace in R&D or regulation for digital technology”.
Meanwhile, Atos’ Barnabé said that apart from supplying supercomputers under the ‘Make in India’ programme, the partnership will usher in cooperation in several emerging domains, such as exascale computing, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.