C-DAC: Press Kit - Archives(Press Releases) - An interview with Shri. R K Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC

US sanctions on export control of HPCC technologies has been bothering, us to some extent. But from the very beginning, realizing that there are likely harder export control imposed, we have been strategizing our activities which have helped us to increasingly make us immune from such export control. We developed OpenFrame architecture, not depending upon any custom built items, and concentrated on critical technologies.

So, in the third mission we continue to work in this direction. This has helped us to offer solutions more cost-effectively and with greater confidence and self dependence.

Can you tell the time and budget outlay sanctioned for the 3rd Mission?

The third mission starts from this January, and has a total out lay of Rs. 49.5 crores, which includes the Government funding of Rs. 39.5 crores and C-DAC’s contribution of Rs. 10 crores. This mission will last for about three and half years and we expect to complete the mission by June 2002.

What are the strengths of C-DAC?

C-DAC has three important strong points. First, we have a very strong core R&D group, one of its kind in the country in the area of Information Technology (IT). We are in fact thankful to the Department of Electronics (DoE) for making us acquire this status through supporting this core R&D group in the form of funding such high end technological development activities. This R&D activity has built the capability of addressing and offering various solutions to real life problems through such high-end technology. Second, C-DAC has acquired the status of a single large organization to provide one-stop solution using its multilingual information technology to various user sectors thereby helping in increasing diffusion of IT. Third, C-DAC has built its reputation of a high end training institution in the country in the area of IT, with its popular Diploma Courses in Advanced Computing, Computer Arts, VLSI Design etc., which are much sought after.

How is the commercialization of technologies developed by C-DAC growing?

For marketing of our products and solutions, C-DAC has a Business Division which has been operating for some years now and doing very successful business in its area of niche. This business had been increasing by 50-60% every year. We did over Rs. 25 crores of business in 97-98. This year too we expect to achieve more than 50% growth over last year’s business. We have been doing business in two ways. One, by taking special projects from our clients, may be from central or state government organizations for delivering a given product, solution or service and second is area is through marketing of our high-end computing and multilingual computing products. We have been also doing a successful business operation through our training activities.

Can you tell us about the business affairs of PARAM 10000 technology?

Using PARAM 10000 technology we are offering the various key applications and solutions to users in different sectors of the economy. This is so as the key is not so much in the business to be able to sell supercomputing machine, but it is to be able to use this technology that we have developed on PARAM supercomputing machine in offering solutions. We have projects going on in the Power, Telecom and Banking sectors. With ONGC we are providing processed seismic data using our own developed code for use in oil exploration. We are working on weather forecasting project in close collaboration with NCMRWF , Genetic Algorithm with Bio-Informatic Centre of Pune University, Ocean Modeling for design and construction of harbors, Computational fluid dynamics, mechanical structures etc. We are building Data warehousing solutions for Banking and Telecom sectors. We are also using this technology for Electronic Governance for Andhra Pradesh States Government.

Our clients as far as India is concerned, are largely in the government sector. We have been able to do business outside India also. We have offered systems based on PARAM technologies earlier to the countries like Russia, Canada, Germany, and more recently to Singapore. Each of these has been a solution using this technology, or providing the platform to develop their own solutions.

In Singapore, we recently completed turnkey supply and commissioning of a system for Financial Modeling based on PARAM 10000 technology. Now we are having discussions with ICAD, Moscow for supply of a very large configuration of PARAM 10000 to develop new applications of mutual interest and offer solutions not only in these countries but also to third world countries.

How do you view the year 1998-99?

After the eventful year of 1997-98, I would say the year 1998-99 has been equally eventful. This year we have launched the largest number of products we have built. These are - the 'Gist Mail' launched during the Elitex 99, the exhibition organized by the Department of Electronics. We also launched our - Communication Co-processor chip which is one of the most complex chips built in India by C-DAC using its own design and fabricated outside and the chip is being used in a circuit in PARAMNet in the PARAM 10000.

We launched – iLeap, which is an intelligent Indian language internet ready eMail processing system and a wordprocessor. Then we have launched - MANTRA which is a Machine Assisted Translation tool, which was later recommended for the Computerworld Smithsonian Award. We also launched - Shaili, which is a CD which provides a large number of decorative designs for multimedia users for applications in designs of borders, motifs, corners for tiles, for web designing , for certificate designing and a variety other of applications.

We started a new centre at Hyderabad this year.

Most importantly, this year is eventful because we are launching the third mission after five years, a mission which is addressing to build a gateway towards self sufficiency in high performance computing technology in India again with support which has come readily from the Government. As a very first step towards it, in a record four months time, we have put together a 16 Intel processor, Pentium II cluster integrated with PARAMNet switch over a Solaris operating environment to produce a peak compute power of over 10 GFlops a system called PARAM 10000 P (PARAM Anant).

Can you comment how viable is Supercomputing technology to a developing country like India?

Viability of a technology to the country comes from two points. One is from cost effectiveness of the technology and second is the appropriateness of such technology to address the problems relevance to the country

Now from both these points the PARAM 10000 technology that we have developed, fits in well. The first justification is that PARAM is a cost-effective technology. The technology which we have is an OpenFrame technology which uses the unified architecture of Network of Workstations (NOW) or Cluster of Workstation (COW) in a Massively Parallel Processing based configuration. So you have a large number of processors which are coupled through high-speed switches based on a given application. So even though the technology may lend itself to be able to build very large machines, every application may not require such large machines. Therefore this technology is to offer solutions using configurations of the machines from desktop to large cluster. So it becomes cost-effective.

Today, HPCC technology is recognized as a strategic resource by every country, because this technology is required for a variety of applications one can think of. Whether it is in the traditional scientific sectors or in other areas that handle large amount of data, for example, for a government or banking institutions.

The other view is that such technology is not easily available as these technologies are heavily guarded. So you have to build this technology if you want to address these applications successfully. Such a technology is appropriate and very much needed in a country to acquire self reliance in this vital area, and thus helps in becoming a major IT power to reckon with.