The Hindu : National : “Step towards knowledge society sans boundaries”

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Friday, Apr 10, 2009
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National

“Step towards knowledge society sans boundaries”

Priscilla Jebaraj

CHENNAI: President Pratibha Patil inaugurated the initial phase of the National Knowledge Network with the click of a button at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on Thursday.

About 2,000 km away on the IIT-Madras campus, students, scientists and professors simultaneously joined in the applause — along with their colleagues from 10 other locations across the country.

They were videoconferencing over India’s first 2.5 GBPS network — a connection capable of moving 2.5 billion bits of data per second. Already, 16 educational and research institutions have been connected to the network; another 41 are scheduled to join them soon.

At the inauguration, Principal Scientific Adviser R. Chidambaram said the plan was to eventually upgrade the Network’s high speed core to multiples of 10 GBPS. That final phase was in an advanced stage of planning and cost-estimation, he said. Institutions would be guaranteed an access speed of 100 MBPS. “The Network is, indeed, a revolutionary step towards creating a knowledge society without boundaries,” said the President.

To understand the revolutionary nature of the Network, consider the significance of the figures. If you are reading this report on the Internet, you are probably using a connection with a maximum speed of 2 MBPS, the highest speed offered to individual residential customers by BSNL. The software giants on Chennai’s IT Highway use a 20 MBPS connection. Till recently, IIT-M had the city’s fastest network, with a 34 MBPS speed.

By offering a connection whose speeds are measured in billions of bytes per second (GBPS) rather than millions (MBPS), the National Knowledge Network has leapfrogged current connections by several orders of magnitude.

Connected institutions are already bubbling with ideas on how to exploit such speeds that allow smooth real-time multimedia communication. Already, the new IITs are able to function effectively only because they have been using the Network to listen and interact in lectures taken by professors from their mentor IITs hundreds of kilometres away.

During the inauguration, IIT-M Director M.S. Ananth told first B.E student Apoorva from IIT-Hyderabad how he and his classmates could access the high performing computing resources available at their mentor institution in Chennai. “The NKN is going to transform teaching and research … especially considering the shortage of quality faculty,” said Devang Khakhar, Director of IIT-Bombay. “It is a great boon to the remote areas of the northeast,” said Gautam Barua, Director of IIT-Guwahati.

Beyond educational institutions, research scientists are exploring the possibilities as well. Zakir Thomas, who heads the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s Open Source Drug Discovery project, said the Network could meet his spiralling computational requirements. Researchers across the country working on a cure for tuberculosis can access biological databases, implement 3-D molecular modelling and share real-time visual data.

Scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre could now access the Large Hadron Collider computing grid in Geneva from their own desktops in Mumbai and participate in international thermonuclear modelling experiments.

Baldev Raj, head of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research at Kalpakkam, hopes that the NKN will let him harness expertise from across the country and the world to design the complex components of the next generation of fast reactors.

The only non-governmental institution at the inauguration provided a perspective of how the NKN could transform Indian healthcare. Sankara Nethralaya does not have an NKN connection yet, but chairman Lingam Gopal hoped that it could take telemedicine to the next level. The NKN could also help create a database of medical records, and advance evidence-based medicine, said S.S Badrinath, founder of Sankara Nethralaya.

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