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Digital networks to aid research

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam rightly emphasised at the conference on `Computing for High Energy and Nuclear Physics' held recently in Mumbai, that high bandwidth networks are vital to extend the capabilities of advanced research today. Frontline research in basic sciences pursued in the country has been unable to effectively link up with global projects or even programmes at domestic centres of excellence in the absence of such powerful networks. There is deep frustration among talented scientists as they find themselves poorly equipped to participate in grid-based collaboration initiatives. It is significant in this context that the Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity of the International Committee on Future Accelerators finds India a decade behind the United States and Europe, at least three to four years behind Brazil and China, and barely ahead of Africa in research network capacity; Brazil's core research network meets the 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) standard, but India has only one 622 megabits per second link to Japan, that too opened for demonstration purposes. Such deprivation, President Kalam pointed out at the conference held at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, affects scholars because research has moved on from stand alone parallel computing facilities (which India perfected in the era of technology import barriers) to grid-based initiatives. High capacity networks are now vital to share large volumes of data generated by a limited number of sophisticated equipment kept in different places, in real time.

The challenge is, happily, not insurmountable because India has only to `light up' its fibre optic networks created by agencies in both the public and private sectors. These must be available to universities, research institutes, and libraries at affordable cost and in an equitable manner. The research community will no doubt feel encouraged that India's institutions are actively involved in two projects that form part of the high-energy physics experiment of Geneva-based CERN, the organisation that is building the world's largest scientific instrument — the Large Hadron Collider — scheduled to become functional in 2007. Explaining the "grand challenge" before the grid community, Mr. Kalam has said it would have to put the appropriate networks in place, to make it possible for scientists in the country to receive valuable data for comparison from CERN and other centres and advance their own work. In addition, there are cascading and society-wide benefits that will flow from network capacities of one to ten Gbps. The slow-moving programmes on e-Governance, healthcare and rural development can immensely benefit from it. The building of the next generation Internet2 applications (which some national organisations such as CDAC and ERNET have taken up) will also receive substantial impetus. There is little time to be lost in building these digital linkages.

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