PUNE: The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has undertaken
an ambitious Rs 7.2 crore project with 12 premier academic institutions in the
country to promote panel processing technology and developing applications in
the area of super computing.
This is probably the first project of its kind in the country to network
human resources and build synergy between C-DAC and academic institutions. More
importantly, this will also provide manpower to build applications in the area
of high end computing, C-DAC executive director R K Arora, stated here today.
Arora was speaking at a review workshop for PARAM 10000 installation and
usage at premier institutes that was held at C-DAC this afternoon The project
has been undertaken in association with the Ministry of Information Technology.
Arora explained the of the project said that this would help them to focus on
certain areas of technology. As part of the project, C-DAC has installed PARAM
10000 at 12 academic institutes in the country. These include BITS Pilani, BIT
Ranchi, IISc Bangalore, IIT Guwahati, MNERC Allahabad, University of Roorkee,
IIT Mumbai, IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Chennai, KREC Surathkal. The installation
at IIT Kharagpur will take place in the first week of August. So far projects
have been identified at 11 institutes. The institutes will work in the areas of
computational fluid dynamics, weather forecasting, molecular modeling,
structural mechanics, seismic data processing, genetic algorithm and
unstructured grid generation. Arora said that similar projects have been
attempted in the US and hoped that this would enable researchers in the country
to use the supercomputing facility for large-scale applications.
Eminent scientist of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore Prof V Rajaraman
who spoke on high performance computing at the valedictory session of the review
workshop emphasized the need to establish a grid for networking computers. He
projected a vision where people could sell their CPU power to build up computing
power. With these 12 centers coming up, it is important to see if these centers
can be networked. He spoke extensively on `Parallel Computing -
Past-Present-Future', predicting that the future would see the formation of a
massive communal database and data repository which is vital for HPC. Prof
Rajaraman said that supercomputers would no longer remain a mystery and could be
easily built off the shelf in the near future.
University of Pune vice chancellor Prof. A V Kolaskar, who spoke on `Bioinformatics'
said that a center of modeling and simulation would soon come up on the Pune
university campus besides an institute for biotechnology and bioinformatics.
"The C-DAC initiative is very important to us since this would solve a
number of problems,'' he said. There is no dearth of manpower in the country.
What is important is how to network the human resources, he added.