Knowledge revolution,keyboard by keyboard

Sanctioned Rs 5,990 crore in the March 2010 budget,the NKN in its current form aims to have 1,500 institutions on board to usher in a knowledge revolution. The impact was evident at a recent meeting of scientists in Bangalore where experts who had experienced the high-power computing now available to them from bio informatics researchers and medical experts to climate scientists and particle physicists held forth on it.

The NKN,its resources and computing powers have so far proved useful in areas of brain research,nuclear reactor safety,search for drug targets and biodiversity research.

The network and its computing grid,Garuda,are linked to international networks such as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN,so that 50 Indian scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre,Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre at Kolkata and other small physics units have access to its data.

These Indian physicists are among the 10,000 from 34 countries who are using 10,000 computers to analyse the 300 pictures per second data - enough to fill three million DVDs thrown up by a processor farm of 50,000 computing cores at CERN.

The Garuda system and the NKN are helping Indian scientists find answers to the big questions, said Subrata Chattopadhyay,an Associate Director at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing C-DAC.

In the dementia study,the NKN has been tapped into for examining brain MRIs of people with cognitive dysfunction. Scientists at the National Brain Research Centre NBRC at Gurgaon have created an Indian Brain Imaging Network Grid or I-Brain and are using the computing powers of the knowledge network,along with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences at Bangalore,the Sree Chitra Research Centre at Thiruvananthapuram,the King Edward Medical College,Mumbai,and the Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research in Kolkata. The I-Brain is connected to international networks in Canada and the US through the NKN.

We have analysed about 200 brain scans sent from different centres and have8230; developed a method to determine patients who can develop Alzheimers, professor at NBRC P K Ray said. India is beginning to see the beauty of collaboration and integration of multiple institutes,multiple countries and multiple companies.

While there are several success stories,there is also criticism that too few people are using the resources and computing power,and that the network bandwidth available is nothing compared to in the US,Europe,China and even Brazil.

We have a knowledge highway but I dont see enough people using the highway. The big research centres like the IITs and IISc Indian Institute of Science are already equipped with high-performance computing facilities and networks. We need to have students from universities around the country on the network. Private industry is also needed, said Prof Shevare from IIT-Bombay.

With the NKN in place,the government will not be sanctioning requests for funds to create smaller computing facilities at institutes and people will be directed to be a part of the network,said Muralikrishna Kumar,an advisor in the Planning Commission.

India is,however,attempting to push up its super-computing resources and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alluded at this years science congress to a proposal from the scientific community for a Rs 5,000-crore strategy under the 12th Plan to enhance super-computing facilities in the country.

The super-computing proposal is aimed at taking Indias capabilities from its current levels to exa flops exa is one quintillion or 10 and 18 zeroes levels.