Centre for Development of Advanced Computing


The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing is an Indian autonomous scientific society, operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

History

C-DAC was created in November 1987, originally as the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Technology. This was in response to issues purchasing supercomputers from foreign sources. After being denied a Cray supercomputer by the United States in 1987, due to military use concerns, India started a programme to develop an indigenous supercomputer and C-DAC was created as part of this programme. Supercomputers were considered a double-edged weapon capable of assisting in the development of nuclear weapons.
Dr Vijay Bhatkar was hired as the Director of C-DAC. The project was given an initial run of 3 years and an initial funding of 30,00,00,000 as the same amount of money and time was usually expended to secure the purchase of a supercomputer from the US.
A prototype computer was benchmarked at the 1990 Zurich Super-computing Show: it demonstrated that India had the second most powerful, publicly-demonstrated, supercomputer in the world after the United States.
The final result of the effort was the PARAM 8000, released in 1991. It is considered to be India's first supercomputer.
The National Centre for Software Technology, Electronic Research and Development Center and CEDTI were merged into C-DAC in 2003.

Research activities

Originally established to research and assemble High Performance Computers, the research of C-DAC now includes:
C-DAC branches and training centers include:
C-DAC provides several courses in the field of advanced computing and software development. Among these are the HPC certification course- C-DAC Certified HPC Professional Certification Programme . C-DAC organises advanced computing diploma programs through the Advanced Computing Training School located all over India. The PG Diploma courses include specialisations in Embedded System Design, VLSI, Big Data Analytics, Geoinformatics, Artificial Intelligence etc. Admissions to all PG Diploma courses of C-DAC are done through C-DAC's Computerised Common Admission Test. Every year, C-CAT is usually conducted in June and December. C-DAC has also worked in the establishment of a number of Centres of Excellence in Information Technology abroad under Ministry of External Affairs' s development partnership projects.

Products and developments