India Plans A Supercomputing Grid

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article at CNET, India is building a country-wide High Speed Network. Named the "I-Grid" (I is for 'Information' silly !), its a feat for the Indians who have been bogged down by U.S. sanctions in the recent past -- besides, with a country as big as theirs, its one helluva project!"

Re:Priorities

[scoove]

Umm, should the indians worry about feeding their own and eliminating bubonic plague as a major cause of death before they build stuff like this?

God do I hope that's a silly European and not a stupid American saying something like that. (It's probably a stupid American aspiring to be a silly European, in all likelyhood).

Actually, I think this is an exceptional move to help get people out of poverty (not that all people in India are in poverty - another rather myopic view). Besides the usual opportunities represented in such a move, technology tends to bring in a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurship (read: a way for poor blokes to move up in the world).

Because of the rate of change with technology, rapid obsolescence, intellectual demands (brain vs brawn), the expansion of technology in any economy really helps young adults create new businesses which in turn feed more money into channels outside of the status quo.

I hope India explores liberal licensing of 2.4 and 5.8 GHz frequencies as well, ensuring this backbone has room to grow. India's telecom network has been terribly restricted, corrupt and ineffective in past years and a wireless broadband framework could serve as an excellent spur network to feed all this new commerce into the backbone.

eliminating bubonic plague

Er... we still have it in the US, buddy! It lives in prairie dogs (which have become recent animal preservationist favorites because they're so cute). Folks still come down with it from other rodent population that comes in contact with the prairie dogs (which are unaffected by the disease).

*scoove*

Re:Get the physical infrastructure sored out first

[Zibblsnrt]

Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.

Do so many people really believe that if a country isn't spending all their money on development, they might as well not be spending any?

...Come on, people, it's not like it's a one-or-the-other decision. It's possible to build roads and computers at the same time, leaps of black-and-white "logic" aside. :P

-PS

Re:Colleges

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically, NCSA at UIUC. I think the NCSA "alliance" thing came later. I would add UIUC and Berkeley to the parent poster's list.

Re:"Weather predictions"

[matrix0040]

From Times of india [indiatimes.com]

C-dac, based in the western city of Pune, plans to link the seven Indian institutes of technology (IITs), the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science and other academic institutions in the I-Grid, Arora said.

The IIT's and IISc and CDAC (as someone pointed out) are all open places. You can just walk into the place. No pass or clearance (for iit's i know for sure) needed.

I can tell you for sure that the terms of use of computational facilities at IIT's prohibit the use of computers for any nuclear or missile research. We don't do those kinds of work there. They're done in BARC and ISRO (though ISRO has joint projects with a few of iit's). But yes you can never draw a line between civilian and defence research. There are many applications of research. People will always find ways to use the civilain reseach for defence purpose but that doesn't mean one should not do research at all and go back to living in caves and hunting animals (ok a bit of exaggeration ;-))

Re:Priorities

[MagikSlinger]

Ah, the crypto-colonialist has crept out from under his rock.

1) India produces quite enough food for its population. It's poverty that's killing people.

2) Bubonic plague thrives in India because of the close proximity of people and animals over much of the country. Would you like them to start exterminating their biota to make you happy?If you are talking about antibiotics, then India needs a lot of cash it really doesn't have right now because they're still an economic backwater.

3) Since poverty is the greatest risk factor for death in India, maybe some industrial advancement would be in order. Not the kind that produces pollution and low wages, but maybe tertiary and quartenary industries, like say, computing science and engineering. Oops! They've been doing that and enjoying good economic growth and increased tax revenues to pay for things.

THUS to better serve the needs of their people through economic growth and transitioning away from a physical labor economy (where education isn't required), they need this kind of project. So please keep your neo-colonialist views to yourself. Do you imagine everyone outside of Europe and America as poor, stupid, starving darkies who need good white folk like you to put their priorities straight?

PUH-leeze! The White Man's Burden is SO over.

Re:India the Next Superpower -wrong history

[NixterAg]

Buddy, you don't have a clue.

The reasons India won't become the next superpower have much less to do with the fact that they are religious than the fact that there are a billion people living in too small of an area lacking abundant natural resources.

The only reason you have this idiotic idea that Indians are more intelligent on the average is because those are the only ones the rest of the world is exposed to. It takes the cream of the crop to go to Universities throughout the world and to go run businesses.

An Indian friend of mine at Texas A&M University was once asked why all of the Indians he met were so smart. She replied something along the lines of "because we left all of the less intelligent Indians in India".

Please, don't be offended by this statement, because I truly mean no ill will. I am just relaying what my experience has been.