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Dated December 19, 2002
The Hindu: Business Line - Online Edition
THE new merged C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), which
came into being on Tuesday, will focus on three areas
- High
Power Computing (the mandate with which C-DAC was
begun), Cyber Security and National Language Processing. Shri. R.K. Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC, told Business
Line.
The long-standing proposal
to corporatize C-DAC has given way to a restructured
model with NCST, ER&DCI and CEDT, Mohali being merged
with C-DAC. Explaining the reason for the change in
strategy, Shri. Arora said that the Government had felt
that the activities were getting defocused from R
& D.
The merger is expected
to give it back the focus on R&D, a priority with
the Government. It is also expected to offer economies
of scale and help avoid duplication of work that was
happening between the organizations.
C-DAC was started as
a society and the proposal to corporatize it was in
the air for a few years, when it took up commercial
marketing. However, the organization still needs government
aid to pump into research, Shri. Arora said.
"We depend on
the Government for up to 20 per cent of the budget,"
he said. The High Performance Computing platforms themselves
do not offer much in terms of revenues.
"To a large extent,
HPC is used by government agencies. World over, no organization
can survive purely on HPC. Even large private companies
dealing in HPC products, make their revenues from other
products,'' Shri. Arora said.
Supercomputers are
typically used in applications such as oil exploration,
climate modeling, space programs, which are usually
the realm of governments.
C-DAC, however, uses
spin-offs from the technology to offer business solutions.
Revenues come from the "purely business" solutions
that the organization provides in the areas of eGovernance,
healthcare (with hospital management systems, telemedicine
and imaging), load management solutions in the power
sector, telecom billing solutions, agricultural database
systems and data warehousing networks.
Another commercial
area is high-end training in areas such as VLSI design,
embedded systems design, Bioinformatics, digital modeling
and animation for graduate students. "We plan to
accelerate training through a eLearning framework,"
Shri. Arora said.
PARAM Padma, which
uses the cluster architecture, and delivers a performance
of 1 tera flop, is the latest in the C-DAC family. Like
the others before it, Shri. Arora sees potential for
it to be exported too. Of the 52 installations of various
PARAM machines, seven have been exported to Russia and
the CIS countries.
"We are in talks
with other countries for export," Shri. Arora said,
declining to give any more details. The formal launch
of Padma is scheduled for next month.
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