By the Executive Director

May I at the outset, on my own behalf and on behalf of all members of the C-DAC family, take this opportunity to wish all our esteemed readers of this House Magazine a very happy, prosperous and successful New Year 2001 in the new millennium.

An occasion like this is an opportunity, both, to take a look at our past achievements and also look beyond, to prepare ourselves to reach further heights in the years to come. As we look back, the year 2000 has been an eventful one. This year, C-DAC saw acquiring for itself for the first time a large real estate in Bangalore for our Research & Development, Training and Business activities in the NGEF building located on Old Madras Road. The New Year would witness us moving in and functioning from this new building.

In the area of High Performance Computing, as I informed in the last issue of the House Magazine, we achieved the hat-trick of supplying the third generation of High Performance Computing System PARAM 10000 (the third in the series) to the Institute for Computer Aided Design (ICAD), Moscow, to become a part of the Russian Indian Centre for Advanced Computing Research.

Our coveted training course on Diploma in Advanced Computing (C-DAC) witnessed the highest ever number of students who appeared for the February 2001 batch in November 2000, aggregating to 15000. Of these, about 3500 have been selected to be posted to 33 different centres across the country. In order to meet the unprecedented growth, we have added new centres at Ranchi, Lucknow, Vadodara, Bhubaneshwar, Delhi, Gwalior, Noida and Pune.

Our development efforts in the area of multilingual technologies continued to bring us laurels with the release of new products -the ISM 2000 and iPlugin which together with Dynamic Fonts enable a host of internet based applications to be developed including multilingual websites. Our self Hindi learning tool LILA Prabodh was adjudged the best shrink-wrapped product by the CSI in the year.

Our activities in the area of e-Governance in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh have multiplied with requests received from a number of States such as Punjab, UP, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat to develop and install various applications covering PWD, Revenue Department (Stamp Registration), Legislative Assembly, Land Management, Archives, etc.

We continued to enjoy the confidence of our parent Department of Information Technology under whose sponsorship we had 13 different projects running in the year and an equal number of small to medium projects sponsored by the other Departments of the Central Government, specifically the Ministry of Science & Technology and the Department of Official Language. These cover such diverse areas as Digital Library, Telemedicine, Financial modelling, Compact PCI based System, Data Warehousing, Multimedia Fault Tolerant System, Language tools covering Urdu, Sindhi, Sanskrit and Hindi. Our latest and the newest project on developing core technologies of e-Commerce is now well underway.

Our focus on generating business through R&D by commercialisation of our technologies and products remained in the forefront and we are determined to achieve the target turnover of Rs.85 crores for the financial year 2000-01.

At this juncture, when we look ahead of the events in the coming year, as we do in our personal life at our homes, in the C-DAC family we also made certain resolves. We resolved that in our current and third mission on High Performance Computing system we dedicate our efforts to building a large (teraflop) cluster supercomputing machine with new and advanced tools in hardware and software. We also resolved that our business and development teams would achieve greater synergy to reach the target of 3 digit (Rs.100 crores) business.

Let us also resolve that we continue to strive together to give to our alma mater an environment, a culture and a framework that we are all proud to work in.

The current issue of this House Journal is dedicated to Hardware Technologies from C-DAC. With the announcement by our Hon’ble Minister of Communications and Information Technology and Chairman of C-DAC, Governing Council, Shri Pramod Mahajan declaring 2001 as the year of hardware, we felt it appropriate to put together our achievements in the area of Hardware Technology and bring it up for information to all our readers, associates and clients. This reinforces the fact that in the environment where software is in the focus by every IT company, we do not loose track of our own strengths in the hardware area.

We welcome Shri Vinay Kohli, who recently took over as Secretary to the Govt. of India in the Department of Information Technology as our new Chairman, Steering Committee and Vice Chairman, Governing Council. A person with vision and clarity has impressed the entire C-DAC family with his ‘liberalised’ approach in every sense of the word.

( R. K. Arora )