In pursuit of R&D excellence

The spotlight’s going to be on Indian R&D at Bangalore IT.COM’s R&D pavilion. The thrust will be on small and medium enterprises doing high quality work, says Abhinav Singh

With R&D centres mushrooming across the country and both foreign as well as Indian players setting up R&D centres, India is poised to become one of the major R&D hubs of the world. In order to boost R&D initiatives being undertaken by institutions and companies, the organisers of Bangalore IT.COM 2003 are providing them with a platform to showcase their prowess at the event—Knowledge Summit and R&D pavilion.

Objectives

The goal of the summit will be to showcase R&D efforts of Indian companies and institutions. B V Naidu, director, Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), Bangalore says, “The idea behind the Knowledge Summit and R&D pavilion is to create a platform for IP-related work for small and medium IT enterprises doing quality work. Since Bangalore has emerged as the fourth largest technology hub of the world, the summit will help reconfirm its position.” According to STPI, Bangalore, around 50-100 SMEs are involved in R&D and generate intellectual property in Bluetooth technology, security, chip design and embedded technology in Bangalore.

The idea behind the Knowledge Summit and R&D pavilion is to create a platform for IP-related work for small and medium IT enterprises doing quality work, says B V Naidu

Naidu says, “During the first six months of this year there has been a 44 percent increase in the number of companies establishing their presence in Bangalore when compared to the first six months of the previous year. There’s also been a 38 percent increase in the number of companies with foreign equity participation establishing a presence here. Apart from this there has been a 44 percent increase in foreign investments in technology.” The pavilion will also include stalls of institutions such as ISRO that have done a lot of R&D using IT and to good effect.

Type of participation

Representatives from AMD, Intel, Ramco, Spectrum Software and many others are expected to participate at the summit. Topics range from future chip technologies, Wi-Fi in the enterprise, the future of parallel and distributed computing, to the future of applications focusing on SMEs and integrating applications. There would also be a presentation of products and packaged solutions as part of a Nasscom initiative.

R&D for small companies is risky

Although the attempt from SMEs carrying out research and development work is praiseworthy, many like Dr S Ramani, research director, HP Labs India, believe that the attempt is fraught with risk. “R&D is not a self contained activity and a company mainly relying on R&D may not sustain itself for a long time,” says Ramani. All new ideas come with an element of risk and it has been observed that nearly 75 percent of radical new ideas fail. Hence, the success rate of a small company going in for R&D with a new idea is low in the long run.

Although the number of small companies doing R&D activities had declined, especially after the dot-com crash, it seems to have gone up slightly today. Dr Ramani adds, “There has been a revival of venture capital (VC) money pumped into small companies carrying out R&D activities as VCs want to try some new ideas, but the rate of inflow is nothing when compared to the dot-com era.”

HPC in India

The toughest computing problems in the world are tackled and very often solved by High Performance Computing. Areas as diverse and essential as weather modelling, automotive crash test simulation, mapping the human genome and modelling nuclear blasts are all part of HPC. Rising performance, dropping cost and surging demand have combined to spread HPC beyond scientific research and into mainstream business computing. It is being used in R&D for business activities.

C-DAC

High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC) is one of the key areas of research and development at C-DAC. In fact, C-DAC was born to initiate and promote activities in this area in India. Over the years, C-DAC has developed several key technologies in the field of HPCC and related areas. C-DAC’s OpenFrame Architecture resulted in its much-ballyhooed PARAM series of High Performance Computers. PARAM Padma at C-DAC’s Tera-Scale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF) is a result of its third project in high performance computing technology and applications.

Recognising the need and usefulness of high performance supercomputing in business as well as scientific and engineering applications, C-DAC had earlier set up National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) at Pune, housing its older PARAM 10000, a 100 Gflop peak computing power system.

Intel

Intel is leading the drive for the adoption of high performance computing in India. Vijay Keshav, industry solutions manager Asia Pacific (High Performance Computing and Life Sciences) at Intel says, “Leading Indian scientific, research and academic institutions are building Intel-based HPC clusters. These clusters are part of a worldwide trend, which has seen a dramatic increase in the number of Intel-based systems being used for HPC deployments.”

IBM

Big Blue has some major HPC deployments running across the country. Rajesh Saha, country manager, Z series, IBM India says, “As the cost of computing has become cheap in India, we can expect HPC to be adopted on a large scale. In fact, we have deployments spread across different sectors like government and higher education, oil exploration and research and for electronic design automation (EDA) customers. Immense potential for HPC is still there in the automotive, aerospace and oil exploration sectors.”

Institutional R&D

Different technology institutions and institutes have been carrying out world-class research in India and are using IT in their research. Here’s what some are doing:

BITS Pilani

* iSERC—Software Engineering Research Centre

This is a consortium of universities and software organisations that is focused upon advanced research in the field of software engineering, based on industry-specific needs. Specific research projects will be sponsored by industry members of the consortium and carried out by faculty and graduate students of university members of the consortium.

* Centre for Excellence in IBM Visual Age for Java and IBM DB2 UDB

The Centre for Competency has been set up in collaboration with IBM. It is a research and development wing that concentrates on projects being developed using software tools like Java, high-level programming languages and DB2. The Centre is currently involved in automation of the Distance Learning Programmes Division, BITS, Pilani. The project is being developed using DB2 at the back-end and Visual Age for Java at the front-end.

* Centre for Instructional Software

This has been set up in collaboration with Digital Think for providing interactive multimedia training using individualised and contemporary teaching technology. Students selected to work in the centre are trained in the use of various software packages, authoring tools, development and quality assurance processes. Students are also provided with means to enhance their skills by learning about the latest advances in IT.

* Centre for Software Development

The aim of the centre is to engage interested students in creative generation of ideas that go towards innovative software development. The centre has adopted multimedia software engineering, object-oriented methods and user interfaces as its primary thrust areas. One of the major activities of the centre currently is to design, develop and deploy multimedia courseware in the BITS Virtual University. The centre is participating in the development of a hospital information system for LSM Inc., a company based in Arkansas, USA.

* Embedded Controller Application Centre

This centre has been set up in collaboration with Motorola India. Its objectives include imparting important features of embedded controller architectures and advanced concepts in the field of embedded controllers through industrial, sponsored and student projects.

IIT Kanpur

IIT Kanpur is the birthplace of multilingual GIST technology, the ISCII code, phonetic keyboard design and other developments related to Indian language computing. The institution has now developed a machine translation system, named anglahindi. This technology can be used for translating from English to Hindi. It can take input from a file or through OCR and can output a Hindi version either in written or spoken form. The software is also available in a Web-based version. Other language conversions are also supported, such as English to Urdu and simple Hindi text to English.

The Computer Science & Engineering Department has worked on the development of 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless technology. The prototype network developed between IIT Kanpur and Lucknow passes through the villages of Mandhana, Bithhoor, Safipur, Saroha and Rajajipuram. A group of faculty members at the institute have developed a series of information technology-based applications such as telemedicine, digital mandi, infothela, infosculpture, education for rural children and learning by robots. SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Detection) had been established at the institute. It is a highly sensitive instrument capable of measuring changes in a magnetic field as small as one trillionth of a Gauss.

Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore

Some of the major R&D areas dealt with by iiit, Bangalore are:

• Databases for Bioinformatics.
• Comparative study of IT clusters across the globe and other industry clusters.
• Labour mobility and training issues in IT.
• Localisation of IT content.
• JTijori (Java-based tool) that won the Cannes GSM World Award.
• Impact of ERP in industry-wide productivity.

Road ahead at iiit, Bangalore

• Research into next generation of mobility, including IPv6, mobile IP and mobility services.
• Next generation of devices.
• Security in introductory courses in computing, including the teaching of programming languages.