One of India’s major successes in the 1990s is the rapid growth of the computer-software industry, which brought India’s high-tech capabilities to the attention of the world. A US$ 100-million turnover in 1992 grew to an output of US$9 billion in 2001, equivalent to 35% of Indian exports and 15% of GDP for the year.
There have been some accusations that this has been achieved without government support, but the importance of promoting software development, particularly for export, was recognised by the erstwhile Department of Electronics as far back as 1972.
Although high trade barriers were then the rule, duty-free import of computers was permitted for companies committing at least 75% of their software output to export. In addition, despite restrictions on direct foreign investment in other sector 5 companies that were entirely foreign owned were allowed to set up software export operations in the Santa Cruz export processing zone on the outskirts of Mumbai.
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In 1984, the government set up the Software Development and Promotion Agency, but the accelerated growth of the computer industry posed several problems, requiring rationalization of these incentives to promote software exports.
The government also launched a huge training programme and funded numerous related R&D projects. Without these and other large investments, India’s emergence as a major force in the software area just would not have been possible. In 1989, recognizing the need for high-performance information technology, the government set up the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
This was a national initiative to design and produce supercomputer systems based on parallel-processing technology. C-DAC has since brought out three generations of PARAM supercomputers, which have increasingly advanced technologies and computing power, with an equivalent of US$25 million in investment.
Typical scientific and engineering applications for C-DAC’s supercomputers are in weather forecasting, seismic data processing, computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and bioinformatics. A particularly successful use, which is of crucial economic and social importance, is the modeling of Monsoon by the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in New Delhi.
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The price: performance ratio of C-DAC’s supercomputers is better than those of any North American, European or Japanese supercomputers, in part because of the initial adoption of parallel-processing technology. Commissioned by C-DAC in 1998 was at that time the most powerful supercomputer in Asia outside Japan, with a computing power of 100 giga-flops.
C-DAC is currency building an even more powerful system, PARAM 20000, with tera-flop capability planned to be in action by mid-2003. This will be used in climate and molecular modeling, genome sequencing, and two- and three-dimensional seismic data processing. C-DAC has supplied more than 50 supercomputers to domestic and exports customers, including Russia, Canada, Germany and Singapore.
The next development is an ‘I Grid’ to link up the main supercomputing sites, providing researchers with access to a high-performance computing facility This will also build up skills in the front-line area of supercomputing, which will have spin-offs in applications such as networking, security, visualisation and large-database management. Locally developed and commissioned I Grids should be two to three times cheaper than imported versions.