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Chitra Phadnis

BANGALORE, Dec. 18

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; Mr R.K. Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC, told Business Line.

The long-standing proposal to corporatise 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, Mr 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 organisations.

C-DAC was started as a society and the proposal to corporatise it was in the air for a few years, when it took up commercial marketing. However, the organisation still needs government aid to pump into research, Mr 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 organisation can survive purely on HPC. Even large private companies dealing in HPC products, make their revenues from other products,'' Mr Arora said.

Suprecomputers are typically used in applications such as oil exploration, climate modelling, space programmes, 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 organisation provides in the areas of e-governance, healthcare (with hospital management systems, telemedicine and imaging), load management solutions in the power sector, telecom billing solutions, agricultural database systems and datawarehousing networks.

Another commercial area is high-end training in areas such as VLSI design, embedded systems design, bioinformatics, digital modelling and animation for graduate students. "We plan to accelerate training through a e-learning framework," Mr Arora said.

Param Padma, which uses the cluster architecture, and delivers a performance of 1 tera flop, is the latest in the CDAC family. Like the others before it, Mr 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," Mr Arora said, declining to give any more details. The formal launch of Padma is scheduled for next month.

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