6-Aug-2018: IIT-Madras develop first indigenous microprocessors under Project Shakti.
Computer scientists and a student team from the IIT- Madras have developed the first of a family of six industry-standard microprocessors. The initial batch of 300 chips, named RISECREEK and produced under Project Shakti, have been fabricated free at Intel’s facility at Oregon, U.S., to run the Linux operating system.
The IIT team says its microprocessors can be adapted by others, as the design is open source. They optimise power use and compete with international units such as the Cortex A5 from Advanced RISC Machines (ARM).
On the test bench, the IIT design fared better than the A5, measured in terms of the DMIPS per megahertz rating, scoring 1.68 against the competition’s 1.57. At a frequency of 350 MHz, RISECREEK can meet the demands of defence and strategic equipment such as NAVIC (Indian Regional Navigation Satellite) and Internet of Things (IoT) electronics.
The Shakti plan started in 2014 as an IIT-M initiative. Last year, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology funded a part of the project.
The plan includes a family of six types of microprocessors. The first to be ready is the C class, RISECREEK. The E class of microprocessors that can be used in smart cards, IoT devices, fan/motor controls, etc., is almost ready and the I class, which can be used for mobile phones, desktops and mobile phones is soon to follow. The design for the S class which can be used for enterprise class servers is underway, and the H class, which will be used for building High Performance computers with a massive parallel processing capacity.
The H Class is part of the next phase of development, which the team calls the Para-SHAKTI (parallel SHAKTI) project. Para-SHAKTI will make microprocessors for indigenous high-performance computers with over 32 SHAKTI cores.
The Shakti project is not aimed at only building processors. It also aims to build high speed interconnects for servers and supercomputers based on variants of the RapidiIO and GenZ standards. These are key to build large clusters of processors to get Petaflop and Exaflop level supercomputers.
With a team of about eight students and three computer scientists, the team used BlueSpec System Verilog language to capture the processor functionality. Everything from that to making the final chip layout was done within the campus. The chip layout was sent to Oregon, to be fabricated by Intel. Once that was done, mounting the chip on a 10-layer verification board and bringing up the chip was done again at IIT Madras. The board bring- up and booting Linux was done in four days. There are 70 million instructions from the point we switch on the system till the prompt comes. The chip executed these instructions without any bug at the first shot.
Intel has fabricated the chip free of cost, and the team incurred a development cost of about ₹1.2 Crore.
28-Jan-2018: Government to set up apex cybercrime coordination centre
To deal with cyber-crimes such as financial frauds, circulation of communal and pornographic contents, the Union Home Ministry is planning to set up an apex coordination centre and has asked states to establish a similar mechanism in every district. It has also released Rs 83 crore for setting up of a cyber forensic training laboratory-cum-training centre for police officials in each state. The funds were given under the Cyber Crime Prevention against Women and Children Scheme.
The apex centre Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) would be set up in Delhi. It would coordinate with state governments and union territories, and closely monitor the cyber space and social media with due emphasis on vernacular content.
The centre would also block those websites which flout India's laws and circulate child porn, and communally and racially sensitive content.
State governments have also been asked to set up a state cybercrime coordination cell at the headquarter-level and also establish district cybercrime cells. The ministry has already created a new wing -- Cyber and Information Security Division -- to deal with the new-age challenge.
The move came in the wake of 1,44,496 cyber security attacks observed in the country during 2014-16.
Over a period of time, there has been a phenomenal increase in use of computers, smart phones and internet. With this increase, cyber-crimes have emerged as a major challenge for law enforcement agencies.
The cybercrime cases are of varied types. These range from defacement of government websites, online financial frauds, online stalking and harassment, and data thefts. Each requires specialised investigative skill sets and forensic tools.
Cybercrime cases pose technical, legal and administrative challenges in investigation which require strengthening of the institutional mechanism.
Phishing, scanning or probing, website intrusions and defacements, virus or malicious code and denial of service attacks are some types of cybercrimes.
National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) states that 5,693, 9,622 and 11,592 cyber-crime cases were registered during 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively, showing a rise of 69 per cent during 2013 to 2014 and 20 per cent increase during 2014 to 2015.
The Home ministry has also advised the states to expedite setting up of cyber and mobile forensic labs, and to identify the need for research and development in specific areas of cyber space. The states were asked to come up with suggestions for amendments in legal and policy framework dealing with such crimes.
30-Jan-2018: India commissions high performance computer system Mihir
India commissioned its High Performance Computer (HPC) system - named ‘Mihir’ (Sun) - at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting at Noida, Uttar Pradesh. The facility will improve India’s capacity in weather forecasting and help it to come out with weather forecast down to the block level (for about 6500 blocks) across the country later this year. At present, such facility is available at district level.
The new system will be India’s largest HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and performance and will propel India’s ranking from the 368th position to the 30th in the list of top 500 HPC facilities in the world. The country will now also be ranked 4th - after Japan, UK and USA - for dedicated HPC resources for weather/climate community.
The new facility will not only help in meeting the operational requirements of the MoES but also support research and development activities in the ministry and other academic institutions working on various problems related to Earth Science.
The new HPC facility will improve:
- Weather forecasts at block level over India which can predict extreme weather events.
- High resolution seasonal/extended range forecasts of active/break spells of Monsoon.
- Very high resolution coupled models for prediction of cyclones with more accuracy and lead time.
- Ocean state forecasts including marine water quality forecasts at very high resolution and
- Tsunami forecasts with greater lead time.