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C-DAC: two decades of innovation

C-DAC’s innovation centers have been churning products and solutions that are used in many key verticals and has bought many accolades, writes Vinita Gupta

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is the premier R&D organization of the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) for carrying out R&D in IT, electronics and associated areas. Different focus areas for their R&D efforts have evolved over the years, primarily as a result of identification of opportunities by C-DAC.

Technology areas

The setting up of C-DAC in 1988 itself was to build supercomputers on account of denial of export of supercomputers by the US. Since then C-DAC has undertaken building of multiple generations of supercomputers starting from PARAM with 1 Giga Flops in 1988.

The core technology areas that C-DAC deals with include High Performance Computing (HPC) and grid computing; multilingual computing, VLSI, embedded and real-time systems, software technologies, cyber security and health informatics. More than a decade and a half of R&D effort of C-DAC in these areas has resulted in several enabling technologies, which form the core of C-DAC’s technical strength.

S Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC said, “These enabling technologies have been further used by us to develop a wide range of products and solutions, many of which have been successfully deployed and are in use in many key verticals such as science and engineering, power, defence, telecom, healthcare, agriculture, industrial control, broadcasting, entertainment, education and e-governance.”

C-DAC has 11 R&D centers that are located at Pune, Bangalore Knowledge Park, Bangalore Electronics City, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mohali, Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida and Thiruvananthapuram. Different R&D centers work on different components of the technology areas.

Through its education and training programmes, C-DAC also actively contributes towards the nation’s growing demand for trained IT professionals. It offers various Masters, post-graduate diploma, diploma and certificate courses in multiple disciplines of IT and electronics.

The company has been recognized by several awards for their innovative products and solutions. Some of the innovations done at C-DAC’s R&D center include Real-Time Weather System (RTWS), G-class or Gist cross language search-plug-ins suite and Bharat Operating Systems Solution (BOSS).

Real-Time Weather System (RTWS)

Simulations of the complex atmospheric events such as flash floods, thunderstorms, cyclones are made easier through the use of computer modeling. Realistic simulations using high-resolution models, data processing and integration and statistical analysis of model outputs and their interpretation demand high performance computing infrastructure. The rapid advent in the field of mesoscale numerical weather prediction, the availability of high performance /super computing infrastructure, and development of scientific data visualization and of Web technologies have made an impact on the real-time weather forecasting practices. C-DAC’s national initiative of developing high performance technology has made is possible to simulate the weather at a high resolution scale.

Ramakrishnan revealed that RTWS (named as Anuman) of C-DAC is a fully automated, flexible, portable, Web-based software developed for regional simulations of the weather. The automated workflow is designed with the objective of providing the user a real-time forecast of weather parameters over local scale (sub urban region). The complex mathematical equations describing evolution of the global atmosphere are solved with the resolution of 36 kms x 36 kms in real-time. The global model forecasts of atmospheric states such as temperature, pressure, humidity, mean sea level pressure etc. are used to initialize regional weather forecasting models. These regional forecast models are then used to obtain the very high resolution forecast of atmospheric parameters.

Real-time meteorological observations are ingested in this meteorological grid point data using the method of data assimilation. The output obtained from this technology can be used for understanding the condition of the atmosphere over the region as small as 1 km x 1 km. These high-resolution simulations are carried out using C-DAC’s supercomputing technology. The numerical data is processed to obtain various information of atmospheric states and parameters in graphical as well as in animated format. This information is disseminated through the Internet.

Anuman’s Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is capable of predicting high impact weather events. The weather forecasts obtained using RTWS can used as a decision support for the situations associated with disaster management, extreme weather event modeling, pollution dispersion modeling, aviation planning, agriculture forecast and maritime weather hazards modeling and a tool for multidisciplinary research community. RTWS is also useful for irrigation planning and to increase water discharge efficiency of dams.

Multilingual search

Search engines, even some of the best in the market, are mainly statistical in nature and suffer from certain lacunae such as too much or too little information being provided, sensitivity to wording and no natural search. Thus if the user wants to book a ticket on a train or a plane, multiple querying alone will meet the requirement.

In the case of Indian languages the problem is even more acute and the existing search engines just cannot meet the complexities of Indian languages. G-class or Gist cross language search-plug-ins suite addresses precisely these problems, so that the user is satisfied.

Apart from providing behind the scenes solutions for search engine developers such as conversion of legacy data to Unicode and also identifying languages which use the same script—Hindi and Marathi for instance, the plug-ins enhance search capabilities by providing a suite of linguistic tools. Because of the complex nature of Indian languages a single word can admit as many as 30-50 forms. G-class provides the user with all the various grammatical forms of a word.

“Indian users of search engines are very often bi-lingual and would like to ensure that the search is conducted in more than one language. A Gujarati speaker would like to search also in Hindi. Such cross-lingual information retrieval is the order of the day for Indian users of the Web,” said Ramakrishnan.

He further mentioned that historically Indian languages have seen cross-cultural impact with the result that loans and borrowings are very frequent. For a word like “alone” there are more than 30 synonyms. To ensure that the search is relevant, all possible synonyms would have to be provided.

G-class also provides polysemic search that would ensure that the user can narrow down his search to a relevant area instead of being confronted with a large amount of data which is irrelevant and based on ranking algorithms.

Apart from those familiar with Boolean operators, users normally expect the Web to work like an information bureau with queries being addressed in natural language. A person who wants to know the price of potatoes in Punjab would simply state: What is the price of potatoes in Punjab? (very often misspelled) and expect an answer to his query. Thanks to sophisticated linguistic tools the Indian language plug-ins allows such searches to be carried out.

At present the searches are restricted to Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, and Oriya. Bangla, Malayalam and Punjabi are under development. Tamil, Konkani, Kannada and the remaining official languages are to follow.

BOSS: Linux operating system

BOSS (Bharat Operating Systems Solutions) Linux is a desktop OS specific to application domain (government/education) with localization support. BOSS operating system is based on Debian Common Core (DCC) with Gnome as the desktop environment.

Ramakrishnan revealed that the worldwide penetration of Linux at the server and desktop level is: server deployment—more than 53% market share, and for desktops—less than 3% market share.

BOSS Linux OS is bundled with BharateeyaOO, a derivative of Open Office suite which supports commonly used document types and open standard file types, apart from utilities such as Internet browser, e-mail client, Internet messaging client, pdf viewers and important features like bulk document converter and device drivers required for Government domain. The desktop environment and applications have been localized so that Indian languages are used and they have an Indian look and feel.

C-DAC continues to strive hard to further establish and maintain its leadership position in R&D in different technology areas. It also continuously explores new areas of R&D in IT and electronics. In this endeavor, C-DAC is already spearheading several efforts at the national level in futuristic technology areas such as speech technologies, next generation Internet technologies, grid and ubiquitous computing, as well as in high-end training.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com