NEW DELHI: The Modi government on Saturday inked a deal with France-based European Information Technology corporation Atos to procure supercomputers worth Rs 4,500 crore for academic and research institutions across India.The Atos and the C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) – the research and development organization of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology – signed the contract. The signing ceremony took place in the presence of Jean Yves Le Drian, French minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs and Ajay Prakash Sawhney, secretary - Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.The Atos has its headquarters at Bezons in France.The C-DAC contract with Atos is aimed at roping in the global leader in digital transformation into the National Supercomputing Mission, which the government launched in 2015 to set up a network of 73 high-performance computing facilities at research and academic institutions across the country at an expenditure of Rs 4500 crore over a period of seven years, indicated officials. This endeavour will add weight to the Modi government's digital endeavours.The contract would clear the way for the Atos to deploy its Bull Sequana supercomputers in India to build a network with a cumulative computing power of more than 10 petaflops.Flops (or Floating Point Operations Per Second) is a unit for measure of performance of computers and one petaflops is equal to a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.The high-performance computing facilities, which the Atos will deploy in India, will include the corporation's advanced BullSequana XH2000.Le Adrian will commence his visit to Mumbai from Friday. Apart from calling on Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis , he will interact with Indian and French personalities from the film, television and tourism industries.He and his Indian counterpart External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will meet here on Saturday. “The two sides will review the broad gamut of the multi-faceted India-France bilateral relations and exchange views on regional and global issues of mutual interest,” Raveesh Kumar, MEA spokesperson said.French Foreign Minister will call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday before departing for Paris.