‘Knowledge revolution’, keyboard by keyboard

From providing Indian scientists access to data from the search
for the Higgs boson, or the “God particle”, at the Large Hadron Collider in
Europe, to developing a prediction model for early detection of Alzheimer’s
disease, a two-year-old project to pool computing resources from around the
country is opening new avenues. 

The ‘National Knowledge Network (NKN)’, as it is known, started as
a small programme in the Planning Commission in 2009 without Cabinet approval.
Now, it is enabling Indian scientists to take on big data challenges that
earlier required weeks and months of high-power computing. Sifting through gene
mutations for diseases or analysing the 30 million per second pictures from the
Large Hadron Collider, say, is now par for the course. 

Sanctioned Rs 5,990 crore in the March 2010 budget, the NKN in its
current form aims to have 1,500 institutions on board to “usher in a knowledge
revolution”. The impact was evident at a recent meeting of scientists in
Bangalore where experts who had experienced the high-power computing now
available to them — from bio informatics researchers and medical experts to
climate scientists and particle physicists — held forth on it. 

The NKN, its resources and computing powers have so far proved
useful in areas of brain research, nuclear reactor safety, search for drug
targets and biodiversity research. 

The network and its computing grid, Garuda, are linked to
international networks such as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research
(CERN), so that 50 Indian scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre,
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre at
Kolkata and other small physics units have access to its data. 

These Indian physicists are among the 10,000 from 34 countries who
are using 10,000 computers to analyse the 300 pictures per second data —-
enough to fill three million DVDs — thrown up by a processor farm of 50,000
computing cores at CERN. 
“The Garuda system and the NKN are helping Indian scientists find
answers to the big questions,” said Subrata Chattopadhyay, an Associate
Director at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). 

In the dementia study, the NKN has been tapped into for examining
brain MRIs of people with cognitive dysfunction. Scientists at the National
Brain Research Centre (NBRC) at Gurgaon have created an Indian Brain Imaging
Network Grid or I-Brain and are using the computing powers of the knowledge
network, along with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences
at Bangalore, the Sree Chitra Research Centre at Thiruvananthapuram, the King
Edward Medical College, Mumbai, and the Institute of Post-Graduate Medical
Education and Research in Kolkata. The I-Brain is connected to international
networks in Canada and the US through the NKN. 

“We have analysed about 200 brain scans sent from different
centres and have... developed a method to determine patients who can develop
Alzheimer’s,” professor at NBRC P K Ray said. “India is beginning to see the
beauty of collaboration and integration of multiple institutes, multiple
countries and multiple companies.” 

While there are several success stories, there is also criticism
that too few people are using the resources and computing power, and that the
network bandwidth available is nothing compared to in the US, Europe, China and
even Brazil. 

“We have a knowledge highway but I don’t see enough people using
the highway. The big research centres like the IITs and IISc (Indian Institute
of Science) are already equipped with high-performance computing facilities and
networks. We need to have students from universities around the country on the
network. Private industry is also needed,” said Prof Shevare from IIT-Bombay. 

With the NKN in place, the government will not be sanctioning
requests for funds to create smaller computing facilities at institutes and
people will be directed to be a part of the network, said Muralikrishna Kumar,
an advisor in the Planning Commission. 

India is, however, attempting to push up its super-computing
resources and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alluded at this year’s science congress
to a proposal from the scientific community for a Rs 5,000-crore strategy under
the 12th Plan to enhance super-computing facilities in the country. 

The super-computing proposal is aimed at taking India’s
capabilities from its current levels to exa flops (exa is one quintillion or 10
and 18 zeroes) levels.

Source | Indian Express | 26 July 2012