The day does not seem far off when scientists and researchers across India will interact with each other at the click of the mouse.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) here has submitted a Rs. 146 crore proposal to the central government to create a high-capacity national eNetwork to facilitate collaborative work.

According to C-DAC, the information grid (I-Grid) will enable the scientific community to eInteract and use supercomputers for research applications.

C-DAC is now awaiting a final nod from the union government to begin work on the I-Grid, which is expected to put India at par with similar systems operational in the US, UK, Japan and China.

While the grid concept is relatively newer, C-DAC Executive Director Shri. R.K. Arora, told TNN that a cluster of supercomputers will be networked to form the grid in order to facilitate research institutes to efficiently undertake collaborative work.

"As per the proposal, the first phase of the grid will cover eight cities, namely Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur, Guwahati and Pune," Shri. Arora said, adding that the grid would also link six of the seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science.

According to Shri. Arora, the government has assured 75 per cent of the Rs. 146 Crore as grant-in-aid, with the remaining to be self-funded by C-DAC. The PARAM series of supercomputers in Pune and Bangalore, and the recently launched PARAM Padma, will be among the different nodes networked in the I-Grid.

While Japan has the world's most powerful cluster of supercomputers, with 36 teraflops to study the simulation of earth and various climatic changes, High Performance Computing facilitates for manifold applications have also been built in the US and Europe.

The Indian grid, according to C-DAC officials, will be powered with 10 teraflops (a trillion floating point operations per second), besides providing storage space of one petabyte (equal to 1,024 terabytes).