Former Executive Director, C-DAC

In the melee of the current Information Technology (IT) movements that has witnessed growth of an unprecedented kind globally, the institutions which have managed to keep abreast of the developments in this sector and have maintained their areas of niche, have established themselves in this fast growing sector. Specialization has truly scored over generalization.

C-DAC recognized this very important aspect of the IT industry, and has exerted to keep pace with the fast developing technologies and create a niche for itself. It has consequently emerged as a name to reckon with as a premiere R&D institution and as IT solution provider of repute.

Our continuing efforts in the area of High Performance Computing (Supercomputers) development have positioned India among the select few nations on the globe who have developed such a capability. As this area continues to remain in the focus, C-DAC has developed and offered applications using its PARAM supercomputers for various industrial, scientific and business domains. Its latest offering in this direction is PARAM Padma, a terascale supercomputing system. As a natural successor to its developments in the supercomputing technologies, C-DAC is gearing itself to develop an iGrid: A Grid Enabled Information Infrastructure for Next Generation High Performance Computing.

In its continuing efforts to develop and offer diverse tools and technologies using its popular GIST technology, to dissolve language barriers for the Indian language speaking populace working on computers, C-DAC has currently engaged itself in such key developments as Optical Character Recognition, Text-to-Speech Systems, Natural Language Processing based information retrieval, machine translation, Web technologies with powerful search engines and accessing mobile devices with Indian language texts. Also the vast reservoir of knowledge and information that is available in our ancient literature needs to be disseminated into the society so as to bring the cultural attainments of ancient India to the fore. A significant amount of work on authoring our ancient literature in Sanskrit, capturing Indian art and creating multimedia titles has been undertaken at C-DAC in the form of Digital Library for Indian Heritage.

As the need for specialized manpower in diverse areas of IT continues to exist, C-DAC in its efforts to build and mobilize quality human resource addressed this area with a difference with its Advanced Computing Training School (ACTS). The difference primarily comes from its activities in advanced computing and software technologies. The courses offered cover such specialized areas as Semi-conductor chip design (VLSI technology), Embedded System Design (Firmware, etc), Digital Multimedia, (3D Animation and VR modeling), Enterprise System Management (Solaris/Linux System administration and Network Management), Geomatics, Bioinformatics and Software Technologies. These courses involve a rigorous quality check at all stages, while the course syllabus is itself designed by the developers of the technologies themselves, with a heavy orientation on practical aspects.

C-DAC has always believed in and struck a sound balance between the advanced research and developments and capitalizing it for good economic returns. Thus, while it has dealt with contemporary technologies of Parallel Processing for High Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Real-Time Systems, Network Security, Data Warehousing, Data-mining, Geomatics, Bioinformatics, Scientific modeling and Visualization, it has applied these technologies to develop and offer real life solutions in the Healthcare, Telecom, Power, Agriculture, Financial and Banking services, Education and Government sectors.

With increasing recognition of IT in catalyzing economic activity and efficient governance through which countries have benefited, C-DAC's activities in developing diverse eGovernance solutions have focused on building key applications providing Indian language interfaces on computers.

C-DAC has been fortunate to be the recipient of continuing Government recognition and support in its pursuit of excellence, as a strong inspiring source that pushed it to achieve one of the most significant accomplishments of a scientific institution that drove its R&D towards a successful economic model. C-DAC has prided itself in practicing and offering a member-friendly culture, a highly transparent and intellectual environment, attracting the best brains and offering them technological challenges to work on. It is these characteristics that have helped C-DAC reach the position it is in today.

With the wide expertise base created by C-DAC and its proven performance, in order to enhance organizational synergy, ensure optimal utilization of resources, and build up activities in its areas of focus, the Department of Information Technology, Government of India decided to merge its like-activity autonomous societies - NCST, ER&DCI and CEDTI Mohali, with C-DAC. With this, C-DAC operates as a mega R&D institution, in the IT sector, leveraging on the expertise of these societies to add new areas of R&D such as Cyber security, eLearning, Digital Broadband wireless networks and Control Instrumentation, and is geared to take up the challenge of pushing the R&D agenda in the liberalized economy.

I take this opportunity to thank all our valued customers, associates and partners for their continued encouragement and understanding.

(R.K. Arora)