The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is a national initiative to mobolize its indigenous human and technical resources in a bid to attain technological competency in the evolving arena of Information Technology and proliferate its inherent benefit towards the advancement of its citizens as well as society

Established in March 1988, as a Scientific Society of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (formerly the Department of Electronics), Government of India, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), is primarily an R&D institution involved in the design, development and deployment of electronics and advanced Information Technology (IT) products and solutions. C-DAC's operations are mission oriented and driven by its focus and target objectives.

In a decade and a half since its inception, C-DAC has established its brand image as a premier R & D institution of national and international repute working in advanced areas of electronics and information technology and developing and deploying IT products and solutions for diverse sectors of economy. The technologies that C-DAC has dealt with are High Performance Computing (HPC), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), e-Learning, Multilingual-Multimedia computing, Geomatics, Cyber security, Real time systems and software, Data warehousing, Data mining, Digital /broadband wireless networks, Scientific modeling & visualization. The key sectors addressed by C-DAC are Finance, Healthcare, Power, Steel, Defense, Telecom, Agriculture, Industrial Controls, Broadcasting, Education and e-Governance.

Pioneers of the OpenFrame Architecture and acknowledged globally for its PARAM series of Supercomputers, C-DAC has applied its High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC) expertise to the fields of Computational Atmospheric Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Structural Mechanics, Seismic Data Processing, Bioinformatics, Quantum Chemistry, Ab-initio Molecular Dynamics, Imaging, Financial Modeling and Decision Support Systems. These applications on PARAM supercomputers are powered by C-DAC's interconnect switch PARAMNet providing high speeds and low latencies and its HPCC software suit, designed to provide Flexible, Parallel and Distributed Software environment for Linux and Unix Clusters.

C-DAC's relentless R&D effort in the HPCC area has led to the foundation of the National PARAM Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) at Pune, and C-DAC's Terascale Supercomputing Facility (CTSF) at Bangalore, which houses the PARAM Padma, with a peak computing power of One Teraflop, ranked in the List of Top500 powerful supercomputers of the world.
C-DAC's Language Technology mission has helped to create a framework for the co-existence of all the living languages of the world, with diverse scripts, on standard computers. In this initiative, C-DAC evolved the Graphics and Intelligence based Script Technology (GIST) to proliferate the benefits of Information Technology to the vast and diversified multilingual population of India.

C-DAC has continuously developed and provided a number of advanced products for the use of computers in Indian languages as well as foreign languages like Tibetian, Bhutanese, Thai, Perso-Arabic and so on for hundreds of thousands of users. The ISCII standard for multilingual information interchange, which has been adopted by BIS, ISO with Unicode computability, was initiated and adopted by C-DAC through a proactive support by the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India.

As the era of a digital economy evolves, the concept of eGovernance assumes greater significance. Recognizing the importance of eGovernance and capitalizing on its skills and technologies developed over the years, C-DAC has taken major initiatives by developing systems for Land Management and GIS based Planning, Telephone Revenue billing, Computerization of Municipal Corporations, Election Commission, Stamps and Registration, PWD, Seed Corporation, State Legislative Assembly, Hospital Information Systems, Electronic Commerce and other similar systems to address specific needs of government departments and organisations.

C-DAC established the Advanced Computing Training school (ACTS) in order to build and mobilize high quality and skilled manpower in the extremely fast moving sector of ICT. Through the ACTS, C-DAC offers a variety of specialised courses covering crucial domains of IT industry. These include VLSI, Embedded System Design, Enterprise System Management, Bioinformatics, Geomatics, Digital Multimedia, Business Computing and Computer Software Development, Specific Masters training courses in Computer Science, Information Technology, Electronic Product Design are also offered by C-DAC.

C-DAC, as an institute of fundamental R&D, in its new unified framework seeks to strengthen its brand equity and create a higher value for its activities in contributing to the economy and the society at large. The key focus areas of R&D at its Centres of Excellence have been identified to lead the initiatives in the areas of High Performance Computing, Bioinformatics, Networking, Internet Computing, Cyber Security, Real-Time Systems and Software, Geomatics, Multilingual and Multimedia Computing, Digital/Broadband Wireless Networks, Open Source software and ICT for Healthcare, Agriculture and Education.

It is a C-DAC reborn and strengthened that will define the terms of success both for itself and the nation. The opportunities have been identified, and C-DAC stands poised to deliver as an R&D institute dealing with ' Tomorrows' Computing Technologies' today.