Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is the premier Indian research and development (R&D) organization of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for IT, electronics, and associated areas. The organization was founded in 1988, originally focused on developing supercomputers. C-DAC is headquartered in Pune, Maharashtra, India with offices in eleven other locations across India. The executive director is Ret. Col. AK Nath.

With the initial delivery of the organization's branded "PARAM" supercomputers many years ago, C-DAC has been the forerunner of the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution in India. C-DAC has been constantly innovating to roll out national level initiatives such as the following: the National Supercomputing Mission; the Mission for Developing Digitally Inclusive and Smart Community (DISC) with focus on Agriculture, Health and Education; Cybersecurity; and Cyber Forensics applications based on Biometrics and BioInformatics applications, including Cancer Research using Artificial Intelligence.

The primary activity in all centres of C-DAC is research and development (R&D) in information and communication technology and electronics (ICTE), which includes a variety of focus areas:

• High-Performance Computing, including the series of supercomputers, Garuda national grid initiative, development of scientific computing applications on these platforms, and cloud computing.
• Multilingual Computing, spanning the entire range from fonts and encoding to speech and language translation, which includes fonts for Indian languages, encoding standards, information extraction and retrieval, machine aided translation, speech recognition and synthesis, etc.
• Professional Electronics, covering electronic devices and embedded systems. This area covers work such as underwater electronics, software radio, ubiquitous computing.
• Information Security and Cybersecurity, including intrusion detection and prevention, malware analysis, cyber forensics, network security, etc.
• Health Informatics, including hospital information systems, electronic medical records, telemedicine, and cancer networks.
• Software Technologies, including e-governance solutions, e-learning technologies, geomatics, open-source software, accessibility, etc.

C-DAC also provides the following products and services:

• high Performance Computing, grid computing and cloud computing
• multilingual computing and heritage computing
• professional electronics, VLSI, and embedded systems
• software technologies, including FOSS
• cybersecurity and cyber forensics
• health informatics
• education and training

C-DAC was founded by the Indian government to build supercomputers because the United States did not allow India to import them. The United States did not want India to import a Cray supercomputer in 1987, out of concern India would use it for military purposes. The centre started building its first supercomputer, a "PARAM," with 1 Gigaflops in 1988, and has been working on subsequent generations of supercomputers since then. C-DAC names their supercomputers "PARAM" both because it is an acronym for PARAllel machine and because it means "supreme" in sanskrit.

Soon after the centre was founded, C-DAC also started building Indian language computing solutions with the establishment of the GIST group (Graphics and Intelligence based Script Technology). As C-DAC grew, the centre created more areas of focus, such as health informatics, and they launched their education and training initiatives in 1994, which has since grown to meet the needs of India's industry for finishing schools.