Address: Pune University Campus
Ganesh Khind
Pune-411 007
Telephone: 91-20-569-4000
Fax: 91-20-569-4059
Email: webmaster@cdacindia.com
Web Site: http://www.cdac.com
Executive Director: R.K. Arora
Subordinate to: Department of Information Technology
Primary Function: Research and design institution involved in the development of advanced information technology systems.

Description and Activities:
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) was founded in March 1988 as part of the Department of Electronics (now the Department of Information Technology). C-DAC was originally developed due to the United States' refusal to sell India a Cray supercomputer during the 1980s. The first C-DAC supercomputer, the PARAM 8000, was introduced in 1991; it had the capacity to perform a billion calculations per second. This was followed by the PARAM 9000 in 1996 and the PARAM 10000 in March 1998. These C-DAC supercomputer models were reportedly used to design the nuclear weapons tested in May 1998. In the aftermath of these tests, C-DAC was targeted for sanctions by the US Department of Commerce. US sanctions not only barred C-DAC from buying materials for nuclear or military applications, but also blocked the sale of Export Administration Regulation (EAR) 99 items that included non-sensitive, non-strategic, and non-dual-use item goods.

In November 2002, C-DAC introduced the PARAM Padma, its first trillion floating point operations per second (tereflop) supercomputer. By April 2003, C-DAC had expanded on this technology to develop a terascale supercomputer. This effectively made India one of the five countries in the world to indigenously produce this sophisticated computing system (the others being the United States, Japan, Israel, and China). In addition to the development of the PARAM supercomputer series, C-DAC also manages the Advanced Computing Training School (ACTS), which has branches in several Indian cities with an annual enrollment of 30,000 students.

Key Sources: Anand Parthasarathy, "Towards teraflops," Frontline Online Edition, Vol. 15, No. 8, 11-24 April 1998, <http://www.flonnet.com/fl1508/15081320.htm>; "Building the Indian Bomb," Center for Defense Information, 19 May 1999, <http://www.cdi.org/issues/testing/inbombfct.html>; "Contact Us," Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), <http://www.cdacindia.com/html/contact/offices.asp#>; "Corporate Profile," Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), <http://www.cdacindia.com/html/about/corpprof.asp>; "List of entities covered by US sanctions," Pakistani News Service, 14 November 1998, <http://paknews.com/>; "Message from Shri R.K. Arora," Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), <http://www.cdacindia.com/html/about/corpprof.asp>; "PARAM 10000 Computers draw huge crowds at Technology Park," Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), 12 May 2000, <http://www.cdacindia.com/html/press/archives/atjn00/spot38.asp>; R. Ramachandran, "Tokenism for CTBT," Frontline Online Edition, Vol. 16, Issue 27, 25 December 1999-7 January 2000, <http://www.flonnet.com/fl1627/16270270.htm>; Samar Halarnkar, "The Grid: Life Beyond the Supercomputer," Financial Express (New Delhi), 30 December 2002; in "Author favors use of 'grid computing' instead of supercomputers in India," 30 December 2002, FBIS Document SAP20021230000087; "Supercomputing success," The Tribune (Chandigarh), 4 April 2003; in "Daily hails India's successful development of terascale supercomputer," 4 April 2003, FBIS Document SAP20030404000071.

	Updated September 2003