Life after supercomputer

Flushed with the PARAM 10000 success, the Centre is now preparing for the great leap forward — transforming itself from a research and development institution into a supercomputing corporate major in the global market.

All that talk of the pin-drop silence in the corridors of C-DAC is a thing of the past. The place today is a beehive of activity with all divisions gearing for the launch of what is being touted the third crucial mission.

The mission may well open the floodgates of prosperity for a nation desperate to be a majorstopover on the information superhighway.

“We want to keep bringing in new technology and we aim to achieve this by using the readily available components in the market which are not controlled through export sanctions,” says Dr R.K. Arora, executive director of C-DAC, reflecting the determination of an institution being denied vital computing components by the United States ever since the Pokharan nuclear tests.

But what has generated interest within the multinational IT giants circle is the fact that the Centre is now seeking practical applications of the advanced computing technology developed by it.

“Accomplishing the task of developing a supercomputer which can perform 100 billion mathematical calculations per second (PARAM 10000) was part of our efforts to improve existing technology. Now we have to derive application of this technology,” says Arora.

And this is amply reflected in the blueprint of C-DAC’s third mission. To be of a three-and-half year duration, this mission involves an entireaction plan of building applications in scientific and engineering areas besides those for weather forecasting, molecular dynamics, computational fluid dynamics and imaging.

Its proven record and high quality technology at a very reasonable price this is best epitomised by the success of PARAM 10000 — is being seen as a prelude to the Centre’s commercial forays.

The C-DAC so far has had over 34 collective installations of PARAM series of computers around the world. Its latest invention, PARAM 10000, which offers the best of supercomputing solutions at a very competitive price in the international market, has also generated a good response in the global market.

One assembly has already been delivered to a Singapore-based firm while negotiations are on to deliver the same to Russia. For the C-DAC, the future looks rosy with business operations jumping 60 per cent in just one year.

During 1997-98, the total turnover of C-DAC, including business generated by high performance computing and communications(HPCC), multimedia and multilingual computing and communication (MMCC) and its advanced computing training school (ACTS) was approximately Rs 25.5 crore. In the previous year, the turnover had stood at Rs 16 crore.

Proud of its flagship venture, the Department of Electronics is also keeping its fingers crossed on the ambitious third mission. And this is why the DoE has agreed to share once again the major portion of the financial burden of the Centre’s third mission. For the previous two missions, the DoE had extended support of R 31 crore and Rs 40 crore respectively.

While research and development will continue to be the base, frontier areas in business are to be new exploratory grounds. Taking into consideration the emerging disciplines of supercomputing in areas of trade and commerce, the Centre has devised its new strategy of business computing.

The prime slots identified are banking and financial sector, telecom and insurance sector and the prized sector of electronic governance.

Another areabeing addressed by C-DAC is the one relating to offering data warehousing solutions. With increasing use of computers for data related applications in a large number of areas, it has become extremely important to plan the use, storage, retrieval and archival of data.

Data Warehousing is a process of assembling disparate data, transforming it into a consistent state for business decision making, policy planning and empowering users by providing them with access to this information in multiple views.

The Centre has already undertaken major projects relating to data warehouse for the Reserve Bank of India. A large amount of data of banking and non-banking finance sector naturally flows to RBI for processing, analysis, research, decision making etc.

The fact that these areas are now being looked upon as the driving factors behind the emerging mode of commerce, the C-DAC has decided to target these as the priority areas, where it proposes to offer best service at highly competitive rates.

“We do not wantto sell PARAM as a supercomputer. We want to sell solutions using supercomputing technologies,” says Arora. “We are not competing with software companies as our priorities are different. We are targeting the high end computing solutions area which will be the future technology of the world.”