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Dated December 18, 2002
Financial Express
Computing major C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) is all
set to be a player in the services business model following
the rollout of the national iGrid project currently
being driven by the company and the government of India.
C-DAC particularly
is looking to spin-off a separate group of people who
will focus exclusively on offering value-added services
like data analysis and storage management of the corporate,
industrial, research and academic sectors besides also
offering compute power leasing services from its iGrid.
Incidentally, the iGrid
is a Rs. 130-150 Crore 5-year project which would link
all educational, scientific and research institutions
across eight cities with a 10-teraflop computing power
and 1 petabyte storable capacity grid which would be
built based on C-DAC's well known and latest PARAM Padma
architecture.
Speaking to the eFE,
C-DAC Executive Director Shri. R.K. Arora said, "The grid would involve eight
cities initially - Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai,
Delhi, Kanpur, Chennai and Guwahati, considering the
research and academia and industries in these regions
and the computer connectivity available via the grid
for these institutions to lease and use.
The services business
is expected to take off once three cities are covered
by the grid which is expected to be installed within
the next three years. Accordingly C-DAC would offer
a two-prong service model to the ISUG - the strategic
user group of the grid, including space departments,
biotech companies, academic, and research organizations,
large corporate like ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation),
BHEL (Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.) etc. The first
part of these service would involve the storage of data
by hosting certain biodata on the grid for the use of
industries mainly the biotech community.
It will also be offering
data storage services to large corporations and government
departments. The second part of the plan is to analyze
the data for the companies.
Interestingly, C-DAC
is also set to unveil a completely new initiative -
Digital Library - which would showcase digital content
on the country's culture and heritage, which will be
ported to the grid as part of the community focused
service.
"Grid computing
is a new concept which is gaining popularity all over
the world mainly for tow reasons - increasing requirement
of industries and academic institutions for high-end
computing and storage devices and huge expenses involved
in owning and maintaining such systems," Shri.
Arora said.
It connects organizations
and companies in a wider geographic area and offers
more computing power and storage space for a larger
group and would workout as a cost effective service.
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