`We are reinventing ourselves'

Interview with S.Ramakrishnan.

S. Ramakrishnan assumed charge as Director-General, C-DAC, in October 2003, soon after it was significantly enlarged to include three other scientific agencies of the Union Ministry of Information Technology. Formerly Head of Software Development Division and Group Coordinator for Convergence, Communication and Broadband Technologies in the Department of Information Technology, he has been involved in the start-up of some of the most far-reaching initiatives in computers and communication in India - as the founder-Project Director of ERNET, India's first network to harness the Internet; as Director of the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai; as founder-Director of Media Lab Asia; and as the National Coordinator for the government's Y2K initiatives between 1998 and 2000. He spoke to Anand Parthasarathy about C-DAC's current achievements and its road map for the future. Excerpts from the interview:

C-DAC has been involved in a wide spectrum of development activities since inception, ranging from supercomputing to Indian language initiatives. What is its current focus?

It is true that C-DAC was a national initiative in supercomputing and was known for its pioneering role in Indian Language Computing. Over the years, the core competencies of C-DAC have widened in tune with progress in technology and national needs. After the merger of other societies under the Department of IT, our parent department, the Ministry of Communications and IT, C-DAC has strengthened its base in many areas and added many new areas. Thus, today - besides our work (notably) in High-Performance Computing and Indian Language Computing - our R&D activities include: Applied Artificial Intelligence (AAI) and Speech Processing; Power Electronics, Real-Time Systems, Embedded Systems and VLSI/ASIC design; Cyber Security; Broadband and Wireless and Internet Technologies; Geomatics; Health Informatics; Software Technologies (including OSS/Linux), Multimedia, Graphics and Database Technologies; e-governance, ICT for Addressing Digital Divide; Education & Training (including e-Learning). In some of them, like its educational and training programmes, C-DAC enjoys good brand equity built over the years.

Typically, our approach is to identify promising "enabling" technologies and build core competence, skill-sets and intellectual property in each, to work towards India's leadership position. By aligning C-DAC's role, vision, activities and road map with the national vision and by establishing and continuously maintaining a relationship with all stakeholders in realising its vision, C-DAC arrives at its programmatic action plans. These also include delivering end-to-end solutions in various verticals such as science and engineering, strategic sectors, e-governance, education, health, power and industrial sectors, agriculture and rural markets. I think this has been our strength over the years.

There appears to be a new thrust in the e-governance area. Could you outline C-DAC's initiatives and achievements in this area?

As in other areas, our thrust in e-governance is also a combination of participation with government and industry efforts in development of architectures, standards, technology, processes and the development and deployment of products, projects and skill-sets using state-of-the-art technology. We participate in Central, State and local-level e-governance initiatives, projects and programmes. This initiative started in 1997 and has grown to a significant extent since 2001.

More recently, we have been working with State governments in Karnataka, Kerala, Delhi, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa, Tripura, Goa, Pondicherry as also the Election Commission, the Indian Patent Office, the Railways, the Ministry for Rural Development (for the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana) and other agencies.

We work closely with the Department of IT in standards process and the rapidly evolving national e-governance initiatives.

All these applications have been effective in achieving their objective, have involved a significant technology component covering the Web, data warehousing, database architecture, geomatics, and advanced software tools. Their relevance has been equally brought about by providing language technology components to break any language barriers by enabling users to interact with computers in their own languages.

Coming back to the Indian language work, how is the momentum generated by C-DAC's pioneering products such as the GIST Card and Leap Software, being carried forward?

C-DAC has a proud legacy in this area and it has been a long journey and an eventful one with lots of firsts: the Indian Language Standard Code (ISCII), the Language Interface Card under DOS/Unix (GIST), the Indian Language word-processor (LEAP), the Indian Language interface to Linux (INDIX), the Sanskrit Language Parser (Desika), Indian Language Parser (Vyakarta), the Indian Language Learning package (LILA), the Machine-Assisted Translation System (MANTRA), the Hindi (Chitrankan), Marathi (Chitraksharika) and Malayalam (Nayana) OCR, the NLP-based Information Extraction/Retrieval system (Anveshak), the Indian Language Interface to Mobiles, the Indian Language Open Office Suite (BharityaOo), and the list goes on.

The GIST card and LEAP range of packages for Indian languages were major successes, which enabled users to work in their own languages. We are now focussing on Speech Technology and NLP-based Information Extraction/Retrieval Systems.

With the advent of the Internet, the huge amount of knowledge/information has posed a major problem of information flooding, but the Cross-lingual IR when integrated with Machine Translation Technology and Speech Technology will provide a powerful vehicle for communication and relevant information extraction. C-DAC is building applications, which will be available on all the platforms: computers, palmtops and mobiles.

In respect of research work, too, our centres are working closely with the Department of IT and other groups within the country and abroad to break new ground.

There is a perception that after the achievement of teraflop computing status with Param Padma, there has been a national slowing down in high performance computing research and development. Is this a fair assessment? What is the status of the C-DAC initiative on a national grid?

Our efforts in high-performance computing are in fact going strong. What has, happened is that pure emphasis on teraflops or processing power is no more our only thrust. While we are pushing performance levels and undertaking technology and software development efforts, we are putting equal emphasis on issues such as robustness, manageability, utilisation, user support to parallelisation, bench-marking, consultancy, domain expertise in identified areas to enable work in algorithm development, modelling, simulation and a bouquet of services such as education and training programmes, facilities management, system administration and performance tuning. Our application groups have also put in collectively enormous amount of work in weather forecasting and climate modelling, seismic data processing, bioinformatics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), structural mechanics, financial modelling areas - to name some illustrative areas. New areas such as earth resources, environment pollution control are being added.

In general, C-DAC's commitment to evangelism of supercomputing as a tool for problem solving in a wide range of sectors and diffusion of expertise continues, in fact stronger. Towards this, we build relationships with academia and research laboratories as also various user agencies through MoUs and joint R&D programmes.

Given this, the use of Param Padma at our teraflop system facility in Bangalore has steadily increased in terms of utilisation time and is today servicing a large number of researchers working in frontier areas and mission critical user groups in a variety of disciplines. We not only have a healthy level of utilisation and more and more set of problems demanding large amount of compute power being addressed using our systems, but are also encouraging new users to taste the benefit of such a system, in turn leading to demand for more clusters of varying compute power in their own organisation or as a shareable facility. The new system that we will install at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) by March 2005 will be one such example. We have plans to bring into operation a 5-teraflop machine next year, followed by a 10-teraflop system the year after.

Looking further, we have plans and road maps for research programmes in collaboration with others to realise a Petaflop system before the end of the decade.

Grid computing has been identified by C-DAC as the next thrust area and the government has approved recently a Prototype Grid Computing Initiative (GARUDA) for implementation over the next 12 months. It will provide an underlying network fabric at 100 mbps at 17 locations to enable remote access to Param Padma and Param 10000 computers and other systems on the network and support proof-of-concept work at research, technology development and applications level.

In recent months, agencies such as the NCST, the CEDTI and the ER&DCI have come under the C-DAC umbrella. What are the projects they are progressing and how will they fit into C-DAC's overall mandate?

We are proud of the richness that each of the agencies, namely the NCST, the ER&DCI and the CEDTI, have brought to the merged C-DAC. It has been two years since the merger and we are noticing exciting opportunities and potential through this coming together. The NCST has brought in software technologies, education and training, Indian language computing, open source software, multimedia, graphics and database technologies, ICTE for addressing digital divide, Internet and e-security. The ER&DCI has brought tremendous strengths in professional electronics, hardware, communications and experience in IT applications - real-time systems, control and instrumentation, embedded systems, VLSI/ASIC design, cyber security, broadband and wireless, power electronics, strategic electronics, agri-electronics, language technology, GIS, and education and training, are a few. The CEDTI has brought in strengths in health informatics, education and training and more. In all, the merged C-DAC as a cohesive entity has R&D thrust areas and core competencies, which together cover a compelling scope of computing, communications and electronics technology.

Examples of successful projects in some of the above areas include - underwater range at Goa, hybrid vehicle prototype with industry, remote inspection device for hazardous locations, and model tea factory at Jorhat. Besides, in the last year national centres have been set up in the areas of cyber-forensics, staganography and power electronics.

What is the status regarding C-DAC's partnerships abroad?

We also see opportunities outside the country - such as the Kofi Annan Institute of Technology at Accra, Ghana, set up by C-DAC with Government of India funding in 2003. We also have a Russian-Indian Centre for Advanced Computing Research in Moscow with a C-DAC Supercomputer and joint science and technology efforts funded by the DST. We also have on-going initiatives in Mauritius, Uzbekistan and Laos PDR (the latter through NIC).

On the technology export front, we have recently had a successful relationship with Britian by which a sizable export project has been executed for TETRA protocol stack.

We have a Research and Training Centre of Development Gateway Foundation (DGF), Washington D.C., at C-DAC Bangalore (with IIT, Powai, as principal partner), undertaking work targeted towards 60 country gateways. ICT for Development is a focal theme here. We have other research programmes and partnership with the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, the National Science Foundation, the European Commission and see greater mutual interest from many other institutions in other countries.

We are also beginning to initiate efforts in public-private partnerships. All in all, we are "re-inventing" C-DAC with renewed energy and vigour.