Dated November 26, 1999
The Hindu, Chennai

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a Union Government organization, plans to work with the Anna University in Chennai, in select areas of activity concerning information technology (IT). Though the specifics of cooperative venture are yet to be worked out, the two institutions, during their preliminary discussions in the last three months, have come to an understanding to exchange their resources mutually.

Disclosing this to the group of Chennai-based newsmen who were in Pune last week, Shri. R.K. Arora, C-DAC's Executive Director, said Anna University would provide infrastructure to the Centre to set up a parallel computing laboratory, which could be used by several departments in the varsity such as civil engineering and statistics.

Credits would be offered to the Anna University's PG students who completed the PG-diploma courses of C-DAC. Besides, the Central organization would arrange workshops or seminars on multimedia designs.

Shri. Arora said the discussions were held with the vice-chancellor, Dr. A. Kalanidhi, and an agreement was expected to be signed in a month or two. Already, C-DAC had a tie-up with the Vishveswaraya Technology University in Karnataka under which the former organized courses for students in seven colleges affiliated to the University. C-DAC was set up in March 1988, as a scientific society under the Department of Electronics (now called the Department of Information Technology) for the development of indigenous supercomputing technology. Its objective was to deliver state-of-the-art, open architecture, scalable, high-performance computers in the desktop to teraflop range. So far, C-DAC launched six different models in the PARAM series of high performance computers which includes the most powerful one, PARAM 10000, having a processing power of more than 100 Giga Floating Point operations.

Shri. Arora said C-DAC was developing the next generation high performance computing and communication technologies and applications, whose prototype would be ready by March next year. Besides, a National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF), Applications Development Programme and Office Infrastructure enhancement and collaborative initiative would be the other areas to be covered. In order to meet the training needs of the existing and prospective users of IT and advanced computing, C-DAC had established the Advanced Computing Training School (ACTS) and a nationwide network of authorized training centres. At present Tamil Nadu had three such centres, two of which were in Chennai.

By T. Ramakrishnan