C-DAC releases two new products for the North East

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the R&D organisation of the department of information technology, ministry of communications and information technology, released two products for the North East (NE) region at the ongoing Indian Science Congress today.

Prof M G K. Menon, Chancellor NEHU and one of the most distinguished scientists in the country inaugurated the Param Sheersh Supercomputing Facility set up at NEHU and released the unique product Cure@Home.

"It is a proud moment for C-DAC to deliver two products at the prestigious platform of the Indian Science Congress through the hands of Prof M G K.Menon," said S Ramakrishnan, director general, C-DAC, addressing the media.

Ramakrishnan said, "We are equally proud that both the products have been developed specifically for the north east region and we hope that it shall usher in new benefits for the local population. C-DAC has initiated a number of projects specically meant for north east region in the last one year.

"These two products represent the result of two such projects in a short period. Other topics covered by various projects include multilingual technologies, geomatics, high performance computing, agri-electronics, disaster management and health informatics. The outcome of the projects will be of great significance for both C-DAC and the people of the NE region, as I am sure that it will enable us to address a wide range of developmental issues in the region. We thank the people for welcoming and enabling us to share our technological expertise for the common good of the region."

The Param Sheersh supercomputing facility was specially created by C-DAC at NEHU, with funding from the department of information technology under the North East Sector Projects.

The facility aims at conducting research in strategic areas of weather, seismic, bio-informatics, physics, computational fluid dynamics, material sciences, life sciences, etc.
The facility has been designed to serve as a core back-bone platform for students, faculty and researchers of the region to develop competency skills for solving grand challenge problems.

The Param Sheersh, equipped with 4 terraflop peak supercomputing power along with 10 terrabyte high performance storage scratch space and 24 terrabyte on-line storage, has C-DAC's indigenously designed and developed low latency ParamNet-3 switch along with NIC, drivers, software, etc.  Back-up network based on Infiniband is also present.  The management capability is over Gigabit Ethernet.  The system primarily has a lot of open source tools, software along with C-DAC's own resource access and management portal. The entire facility and as data centre and associated equipment has been established by C-DAC.

Cure@Home
Cure@Home is a decision support system with a knowledge base of integrative medicine (allopathy, ayurveda, homeopathy, yoga) to address the healthcare needs of a common man. It is a health educational tool, which can be deployed on personal computers or at kiosks and can be used at homes, clinics, hospitals, healthcare centres, public places and schools.

Available on PCs and touch screen kiosks, Cure@Home is targeted at primary care of diseases, to minimise the burden on the health care delivery system. It offers home remedies for diseases and symptoms, as well as advice on diet and lifestyle according to constitution, diseases, seasons etc. Its features also include a multimedia gallery for easy perception and interactive applications like body mass index (BMI) calculator, waist hip ratio (WHR) calculator, immunisation scheduler, expected date of delivery calculator, among others.

Dr Medha Dhurandhar, chief coordinator (north east projects), C-DAC, expressed her happiness at the successful release of the products and commented "the north east region is a high priority area of development for C-DAC. Cure@Home is a product that is borne out of the cooperation between C-DAC's experts as well as resource persons from the region. This partnership only strengthens our resolve to continue to work together and develop new products and technologies that shall not only benefit the common man but also create new opportunities for the development of the region."

C-DAC is also showcasing several other products in technology areas like high performance computing, language technology, geomatics, applied artificial intelligence, Information and communication technologies and so on. Several of these products have been deployed in real life environments and have been widely accepted.