He is the first Indian to be conferred the Distinguished Engineer '09 honour

Dr. Pradeep Kumar Sinha

The Chief Co-ordinator of Research and Development at the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Pradeep K. Sinha has recently been conferred the recognition of 2009 Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), USA. The ACM is one of the world's largest educational and scientific computing societies. Sinha is among the 17 engineers from across the globe to have been selected for this recognition. He is the first and only Indian to get it. He spoke to Nilanjana Ghosh Choudhury on the award and other issues.

Q. When were these awards announced and how significant is it in terms of India's development in the field of high performance computing?
A- The announcement was made in New York on November 9. The award recognises those with a minimum of 15 years of experience in the field of high performance computing (HPC) and those who have made significant accomplishments or make a significant impact on the computing field. The award is of importance to C-DAC and India, as for the first time, the apex organisation has recognised the work done in India and given an award to an Indian in the engineering category.

Q. Though touted as one of the best discoveries so far, super computers or HPCs have never quite been able to reach the masses. What do you think needs to be done to address the issue?
A- Just creating an HPC is not enough. We have to create national facilities and applications with the help of HPC that can be of help for the common man. People should be able to use the facilities, otherwise it is useless. Therefore C-DAC through the years had taken several initiatives to ensure that it reaches the common man. Apart from the PARAM series, we are also into health informatics that can help in bettering the healthcare solutions in the country.

Q. What were the main hindrances in making HPC applications available to people and what are you doing to meet the challenges?
A- We found that using supercomputers was a hindrance as it required different programming paradigm and understanding. That is the reason why the system was built but remained unutilised for almost 10 years. So realising the problem, we built parallel applications for people and address grassroots problems, and built low cost solutions so that a large number of people can use it.

Q. You are also heading the health informatics department at C-DAC. Elaborate on the projects undertaken.
A- Whenever we speak about healthcare, we take into account individual citizen data but in the future, we will have to look at the bigger picture of maintaining national health records which will require HPCs. We have recently initiated a technological R&D with the Swedish Institute of Computer Sciences to explore how distributed storage can be created and stored to maintain electronic health records in any country.

More about Sinha
Sinha was with Multimedia Systems Research Laboratory of Panasonic in Toyo, Japan, and has contributed to the advancement of science and technology and technical education. He holds two international patents and has authored a number of technical papers and three books. His book titled Distributed Operating Systems: Concepts and Design is used as a textbook in many universities worldwide. The Japanese language edition of the book has also been brought out in Japanese universities by SciTech Press, Inc., Tokyo, Japan. Sinha's other two books titled Foundations of Computing and Computer Fundamentals are widely used across India.

By: Nilanjana Ghosh Choudhury