C-DAC to get its own campus

PUNE: A long-cherished dream of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will soon come true. The institute is to get its own campus, a 1.5 lakh sq ft area, called the C-DAC Innovation Park on Pashan road. Till date, C-DAC, which was established in 1988, has been functioning from a campus within the University of Pune and another rented place in Aundh and the College of Agriculture.
Innovation Park is a nine-storey structure and is budgeted at Rs 48 crore. It will be partly (60 %) funded by the Department of Information technology and will be solely used for Research and Development (R&D) purposes. Training will continue at the present campuses.
S P Dixit, director, C-DAC told TOI on Wednesday, "There was a long felt need for expansion as well as to have our own campus. The present infrastructure is very small and scattered. However, all these shortcomings will soon be solved with the new campus coming up."
The Innovation Park is spread over 1.5 acres of land next to the Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET) in Pashan and will house the entire R&D activities of C-DAC in Pune. Construction began on April 27 this year and is expected to be completed by September 2010.
"At present, we are working on quite a few areas of research including high performance computing (HPC), multi-lingual computing, bioinformatics and e-governance, among others. We basically want to separate R&D and training and the Innovation Park will help us do this," Dixit said.
This building will house an HPC laboratory, multi-lingual computing laboratory, health informatics section and geomatics section. The DIT will bear 60 per cent of the expenses and C-DAC will take care of the rest through internal revenue generation.
"This year we will spend most of our funds on infrastructure. A part of the allocation made by the Union government in the 2009-10 budget will also be used to build this campus. This year, we will spend about Rs 36 crores on the Innovation Park," Dixit said.