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Neeraj Saxena
New Delhi, Sept 20: Supercomputers in India need to be customised and the government ought to focus on marketing aspect for the commercial applications to start in a big way, feels the pioneer of supercomputing in India, V Rajaraman, honourary professor at the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
The time has come when our supercomputers come out from the realms of pure research and defence-related usage and in other government departments to be exploited commercially in diverse fields, feels Rajaraman. Particularly so as the cost of these high-performance machines is coming down worldwide and the speed going up by a few notches, he added.
Supercomputing in India had started with C-DAC a decade ago and Dr Rajaraman has played a key role in its success. The US had charged SERC of clandestinely carrying out research work supporting the Indian nuclear programme, a charge Rajaraman denied stoutly.
The business group of C-DAC which was supposed to havebeen hived off as a separate company never took off and there seems little hope of that happening in the near future as the head of that unit too has resigned from C-DAC, Rajaraman informed.
Database mining and warehousing, financial markets and systems, designing of drug modules and other medical research, geographical and geological applications, mapping ocean currents, ozone depletion, space research and advanced and sophisticated designing of aircraft and automobiles are some of the areas where the role of high-speed supercomputers are becoming crucial and there is no reason why India should be left behind, he added.
India's Param programme had, unfortunately, not found any other application except in scientific research. Worldwide, the heydays of even the high-speed Cray computers are over and the field will soon witness exponential boom as even the desktop machines become extremely fast and and more and more high-speed networks are being attached with each other.
The scientist felt that the USefforts at stunting Indian supercomputing had come to a naught and they themselves knew how advanced we were in writing our own software. For a better future however, it was important that the government recognised the need of setting up a large semiconductor industry so the benefits of past progress could be capitalised.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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