Moscow, July 3, 2000

Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, Minister for Science & Technology, Human Resources Development and Ocean Development, Government of India inaugurated the Russian-Indian Centre for Advanced Computing Research at the Institute for Computer Aided Design (ICAD), of Russian Academy of Sciences on July 3, 2000 in Moscow before an impressive gathering of scientists from Russia and India. This day also commemorates the thirteenth successful year of the launch of the Integrated Long Term Programme (ILTP) of cooperation in science and technology between India and Russia.

The Centre is being established as one of the activities under the ILTP. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, India, which is an autonomous scientific society of the Department of Information Technology, Government of India, is the collaborating institution from the Indian side for establishment of this Centre.

Both C-DAC and ICAD have been the principal organizations involved in the collaboration in the areas of advanced computing for almost a decade. During this period, C-DAC has supplied two versions of its High Performance computer (supercomputer) PARAM to ICAD.

These have been successfully used for research in the areas of fluid mechanics and structural analysis. Scientists from both the countries have also exchanged visits over these years under this collaboration. This has helped in parallelizing a number of application software codes of mutual interest.

The success of this collaboration has manifest in the finalization of a long term Programme of Cooperation between the Indian Department of Science & Technology and Russian Academy of Sciences. The Centre is being established in Moscow to give shape to this program. The Centre has recently acquired C-DAC's latest PARAM 10000 supercomputer, which will be used for the development of various software applications of mutual interest. The Indian Government has committed to meet one third of the cost of this system with the other two thirds being met by the ICAD. Under the program, the full configuration of PARAM 10000 developed by C-DAC and housed in the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) in India will also be used by C-DAC for joint development. The areas of joint development identified in the initial stage are weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, seismic data processing and parallel compilers. Projects of specific interest to Russia have also been identified. The program, therefore, aims at building synergy between the advanced computing development experience of C-DAC and application software experience in scientific fields at ICAD. These developments will thus address the needs in both India and Russia as also the third world countries.

On the occasion Dr. Joshi announced that the Government of India would provide grants to the Centre to match with the support provided by the Russian Academy of Sciences for an initial period. Advanced computing has become a strategic resource which every country strives to possess in view of its wide ranging applications in both scientific and engineering fields and business computing areas. Such technologies and expertise are available with only a few countries in the world he added. The proposed collaboration between Indian and Russian institutions will help in addressing the requirements in these fields he opined.

The Russian Minister for Science & Technology, Mr. Kripechenkov expressed his satisfaction on the ongoing collaboration between Indian and Russian institutions in these areas and hoped to see this collaboration strengthened with a view to develop higher synergy between the institutions.

Prof. V.S. Ramamurthy, Secretary to the Indian Government, Department of Science & Technology drew attention to the importance of advanced computing in which developments are taking place internationally at a breathtaking pace. It was, therefore, important to build collaborations between experts of various institutions to produce fast results and remain competitive in these fields he added. He commented, "We must build commercial solutions at a cost-effective price for various computer intensive applications".

The Centre would be overseen by a joint committee, while its day-to-day operations would be managed by ICAD. Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC and Academician O.M. Belotserkovskii, Director, ICAD will be the respective coordinators for this program.