Pune, November 22, 2003

Dr. Arun Shourie, Honorable Minister of Disinvestment and Communications & Information Technology was here in the city today, to visit the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). Dr. Shourie is also the Chairman of the Governing Council of C-DAC.

To assess the recent developments and ongoing activities of C-DAC, Pune and interact with scientists, Dr. Shourie took special time off from his busy schedule in Delhi and spent a good part of the day at the C-DAC labs.

A special programme was organized in honor of Dr. Shourie's visit, wherein Shri. S Ramakrishnan, the newly appointed Director General of C-DAC delivered the corporate presentation, highlighting the initiatives being undertaken to bolster the R&D drive, as well as the new vision for the organization. Shri. Ramakrishnan also explained the reforms and ideas that he has been trying to bring into the organization in terms of strategy and goals to retain the equity of C-DAC as a premier R&D institution.

During his visit, Dr. Shourie addressed the members of C-DAC, expressing his appreciation of the efforts of the members in contributing to the nation's IT goals, while lending credibility to the Government's commitment of an IT-enabled nation. He expressed his delight at being in C-DAC and exhorted members to excel in areas that address a real felt need of the nation, while reiterating the Ministry's commitment to serve and assist C-DAC to help achieve excellence.

Shri. S Ramakrishnan also conducted Dr. Shourie on a tour of the various facilities and labs of C-DAC including the GIST group, the Applied Artificial Intelligence (AAI) group, the Hardware Technology Development group (HTDG), Geomatics group and so on. The tour also included a visit to the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) housing the PARAM 10000, predecessor to the PARAM Padma. Dr. Shourie also witnessed a demonstration of the various applications such as Computational Structural Mechanics, Bioinformatics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Seismic Data Processing, Computational Chemistry, Evolutionary Computing, Weather Forecasting, Climate Modeling and so on, being run on the PARAM 10000 and on the PARAM Padma linked through the newly upgraded 100 mbps link
and grid computing.

Hailing the initiatives of C-DAC, Dr. Shourie described his entire experience as a summary of the nation's prowess in all the domains of the IT sector, and expressed his desire that C-DAC will continue to cross all barriers to establish India as an IT-enabled nation.

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