Bharat Rakshak

Bart S wrote:There are probably hundreds of PCB factories in China, not sure about India but I would be very surprised if we don't have at least a few.

uskumar wrote:nice to see RBI being firm in Data localization.
Now to the next step. Localization of Personal data including emails.

Things government can do to complement rbi data storage

souravB wrote: RBI and in extension GoI for other verticals is not doing it out of the goodness of their heart or even from data security point.

hanumadu wrote:Is Machine Learning still considered hype or is it here to stay?

Hyderabad: Telangana continues to attract investments into the State. The latest to add to the list is the marquee technology giant Intel which will soon set up its technology development centre in Hyderabad.

A top delegation headed by Nivruti Rai, country head, Intel India, met Telangana IT Minister K T Rama Rao at Camp office in Hyderabad on Friday.

In the meeting, Intel delegation and the Minister talked about the industrial policy of Telangana and the infrastructure of Hyderabad, which encouraged the tech giant to choose Hyderabad to set up their tech centre.

“We are very happy that Intel decided to start a tech center in Hyderabad,” said KT Rama Rao.The Intel India centre in Hyderabad will provide a major boost to the IT sector in the region. The proposed centre is expected to create 1,500 jobs in its initial stages.

The government of Telangana and Intel delegation had held several meetings which culminated into setting up of the centre in Hyderabad.

The delegation invited Minister K T Rama Rao to attend Intel India’s 20th anniversary scheduled on November 15 in Bengaluru.

ArjunPandit wrote:

hanumadu wrote:Is Machine Learning still considered hype or is it here to stay?

It's here to stay, but it will evolve. It's basically commoditizataion of a luxury called predictive/statistical/time series modeling.

Singha wrote:

ArjunPandit wrote: It's here to stay, but it will evolve. It's basically commoditizataion of a luxury called predictive/statistical/time series modeling.

the top data scientists now enjoying the fattest pkgs in india are mostly from maths/stats backgrounds and entered into ITvity after prior careers in places like indian statistical instt, india meterological bureau monsoon data crunching, Actuaries in insurance & loans sector building risk and mortality models. they were already deeply grounded in the maths and stats theoritical knowledge and knew most of the data analysis and mining techniques @ scale.

ofcourse not so cool sounding as ecommerce or ads based free model of data mining on people.

the online courses now claiming to teach data science are just going over the bare basics of the underlying theory and focussed on tools and libraries probably.

Singha wrote:

ArjunPandit wrote: It's here to stay, but it will evolve. It's basically commoditizataion of a luxury called predictive/statistical/time series modeling.

the top data scientists now enjoying the fattest pkgs in india are mostly from maths/stats backgrounds and entered into ITvity after prior careers in places like indian statistical instt, india meterological bureau monsoon data crunching, Actuaries in insurance & loans sector building risk and mortality models. they were already deeply grounded in the maths and stats theoritical knowledge and knew most of the data analysis and mining techniques @ scale.

ofcourse not so cool sounding as ecommerce or ads based free model of data mining on people.

the online courses now claiming to teach data science are just going over the bare basics of the underlying theory and focussed on tools and libraries probably.

Casual visitors to R Vijayaraghavan’s lab can be easily dazzled by his fancy equipment, one of which can cool bits of matter to temperatures well below that of deep space. His prize exhibit though is a tiny device that he has built, a proto-chip if you will, which he is developing to be part of powerful quantum computers in the future. Such a computer does not exist at the moment. Whoever builds one early will have a tool to dominate the world.

The foundation of quantum computing is a unit called the qubit, the basic unit of information in a quantum computer. Making qubits and getting them talk to each other is a hard task, because they are touchy and easily give up their quantum-ness when in contact with the outside world. Connecting them and making them work together is a harder task. Vijayaraghavan, a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, has made a three-qubit processor where each qubit is connecected o each of the other two qubits.

In terms of the number of qubits, it is trivial. Early this year, Google announced that it had a quantum processor with 72 qubits, and IBM had demonstrated a 50-qubit processor last year. But their processor architectures are different from that of the TIFR device. In the IBM-Google approach, a qubit is connected only to the neighbouring qubits. In the TIFR device, every qubit will be connected to every other qubit. If Vijayaraghavan manages to scale his is processor to more qubits, he may have a processor that is very efficient in translating algorithms.

Quantum computers are entirely different from the so-called classical machines, as they are capable of solving problems that are impossible for today’s computers. In this sense, they are not super versions of today’s computers. A supercomputer, no matter how fast, cannot break security codes used in military and business communications. A quantum computer can break them in minutes. If, for example, someone in the world develops a quantum computer, all of today’s security codes become worthless. We would then need to design new ones using quantum computers.

In the global race to build quantum computers, India has so far been present only in theory compared to US, China and the handful of other European countries that were spending large amounts of money. India had no national programme. It had a number of theorists, but only a few had been trying to build a quantum computing device.

The basic need of a computer is a property with two states, like the presence or absence of current in a transistor in contemporary computers. Vijayaraghavan uses the presence or absence of an oscillation in a device kept at low temperature. Some physicists have tried to use spin, the way a particle aligns itself to a magnetic field, as a qubit. At the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Mohali, Kavita Dorai is using spin as a quantum state, and has run quantum algorithm on a five-qubit device.

At IISER Pune, Umakant Rapol researches how to network quantum processors while TS Mahesh looks at quantum information and artificial intelligence for quantum control. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore has several groups that work together. For example, assistant professor Vibhor Singh is researching on ways to build quantum processors in two dimensions, instead of 3D, as a better way of scaling them.

Now, promise of increased funding gives Indian researchers an opportunity to catch up with the rest of the world. “We are late,” says Vijayaraghavan, “but not so late that we cannot make a global impact.”

The power of quantum computing comes from the seemingly bizarre nature of matter at the atomic level. Classical computers store information in two states, either 1 or 0. In the classical world, which we all see and touch, one thing can exist in only one state at a time. In the quantum world, a particle can exist in two states. Not either 1 or 0 but both. Or other states in between. All at the same time.

Due to this property called superposition, quantum computers have the ability to do an extraordinary amount of calculations simultaneously. It can factor large numbers quickly, a feature that is important for information security. Current security systems use factors of large prime numbers as codes, but quantum computers can decode them easily. When codes can be broken easily, we need to use quantum mechanics to make other codes that cannot be broken by quantum computers. Which is why it is important to develop this technology for business and national security.

Quantum computers will also let us simulate nature at unprecedented levels. What happens really at the molecular level inside the body? Quantum computing will help simulate molecular interactions so well that we can design super-drugs that can cure diseases with little or no side-effects. “These are technologies no one is going to give you,” says Umakant Rapol, associate professor at IISER in Pune.

Among other things, Rapol is developing methods to scale quantum computers to useful levels. So far, one of the biggest problems in quantum computing is our inability to put together a large number of qubits to form a working computing device. For some reason, the qubits do seem to lose their quantum behaviour when they are put together.

None of this research is going to result in a commercial quantum computer in the country soon. But developing the technology can have other uses, many of which are strategic. For example, quantum computers are supposed to let us develop extremely sensitive interferometers that can provide precise locations of objects, which, in turn, can be useful to anything from leaking pipes to forecasting volcanic eruptions.

In the end, a large number of strategic industries are going to be based on quantum computing and related sciences. “In the 21st century,” says Kavita Dorai, “there is a clear advantage for nations having information. To use this information, we have to invest in quantum information and related technologies.”

India is now taking small steps towards laying the foundations of this technology. “Money may induce those who are working in the periphery to move into this area,” says Ashutosh Sharma.

French IT services firm Atos has won a three-year contract to build the first phase of supercomputers under India’s Rs 4,500-crore National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) as the country looks to create a cluster of machines for weather forecasting, drug discovery and data mining.

The tender to build these highperformance computers (HPC) had been floated by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in February. Atos would be deploying its energy efficient Direct Liquid Cooled BullSequana supercomputers in India.

The contract is for all three phases of the NSM which would be running simultaneously, said C-DAC director general Hemant Darbari. “In Phase I, we will be assembling three supercomputers at an outlay of Rs 68 crore. In Phase II, it will be an aggregate of 10 petaflop, but the number of computers is yet to be decided,” he said.

The NSM is divided into two key tracks, build and buy, which are being spearheaded by the C-DAC and Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science respectively. Atos has won the contract for the ‘build’ part of the NSM for which it will partner CDAC in all three phases of the project. While Phase I involves assembling of the supercomputers, in Phase II, certain components like the motherboards would be manufactured locally, and in the third phase, the supercomputer would be designed in India by C-DAC.

In the first phase, IIT-Kharagpur will have a 1.3 petaflop machine and IISER Pune and IIT-BHU will have a 650 teraflop computer each. Atos will source the components from France and assemble the supercomputers in Chennai. “Work will happen simultaneously on all three phases, but each has different stages of delivery. The deliveries under Phase I will start in the first quarter of next year while

Phase II would be around Q2 or Q3,” said Arvind Bajaj, head of Atos Bull India.

When exactly the first set of supercomputers are delivered will also depend on whether the data centres at the institutes are ready. While C-DAC has already put out a tender for these, the contract has yet to be awarded.

Atos has a sizeable presence globally in the High performance computing (HPC) business under the Bull brand. In September it unveiled its most powerful supercomputer with a compute power of 12 petaflops in Germany, making it the country’s most powerful supercomputer, coming in at number 16 on the recently released Top 500 supercomputer rankings. The company has a supercomputer and server design centre in Bengaluru, which will work closely with C-DAC on subsequent phases of the project.

The NSM is being jointly implemented by the Department of Science and Technology and Department of Electronics and Information Technology at an estimated cost of Rs 4,500 crore over a period of seven years. The mission was announced three years ago with an intent to propel India higher in the global supercomputer rankings. The aim was to build a grid of 73 supercomputers across academic and research institutes in India, working on a wide range of applications, from weather forecasting to disaster management. HPC is important in order for India to make significant progress in various areas, from drug discovery to astrophysics and bioinformatics.

Vips wrote: CDAC built the Param series of Super computers more the 2 decades back. Why is it again buying from abroad?

Prasad wrote:You expect CDAC to setup a billion $ foundry to make a few thousand CPUs and RAM?

Singha wrote:IISC proposal for a 3500 cr foundry for research and strategic uses is the real deal.
it is still awaiting GOI approval.
and GOI still has not spent money on upgrading the chandigarh fab to somewhere near world class nanometer tech. our strategic products could benefit from newer techs instead of just sturdy old stuff.

Vips wrote:
The Rs 4,500-crore NSM envisions a network of over 70 connected supercomputers at academic and research institutions across the country, which will aid India in areas ranging from weather forecasting to drug discovery and astrophysics, among others.

isubodh wrote:

Vips wrote:
The Rs 4,500-crore NSM envisions a network of over 70 connected supercomputers at academic and research institutions across the country, which will aid India in areas ranging from weather forecasting to drug discovery and astrophysics, among others.

Can this type of power be created using GPU's/TFU's on say Google cloud ? Will having dedicated machines be cost-effective than hiring on cloud ?

Singha wrote:even the 24x7 health monitor bracelets w/A-GPS is mining and uploading a fair amt of data wrt to our health and whereabouts.
apple watch will take EKG. soon probably sonograms and other stuff. a woman who has conceived and does not know of it yet will get ads for baby products. a balding man for hair oil, a aeging man for ****.

we are being watched and analyzed in minute detail.

isubodh wrote:

Vips wrote:
The Rs 4,500-crore NSM envisions a network of over 70 connected supercomputers at academic and research institutions across the country, which will aid India in areas ranging from weather forecasting to drug discovery and astrophysics, among others.

Can this type of power be created using GPU's/TFU's on say Google cloud ? Will having dedicated machines be cost-effective than hiring on cloud ?

Singha wrote:why exactly does it hurt US/EU cos to keep a small datacenter here and a few people with clearances to manage this data on indian consumers?
they could even rent the space within cloud providers here. its not really a big deal.

we should tell the EU/xyz to stfu and go with the same threat to US and China to whose demands they had no voice.

Vips wrote:Infosys opens hub in Hartford, hires 7000 Americans so far.