Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Friday requested the Centre for setting up a Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Regional Centre at Bhubaneswar.In a letter to Union Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Chief Minister said the establishment of the regional centre would accelerate research in high-performance computing and data analytics and its application in industries and governance in Odisha.Presently, Kolkata has the only regional centre of C-DAC in the eastern part of the country."Establishing a C-DAC Regional Centre at Bhubaneswar will enable faculty, Ph.D scholars, and students to solve problems of state and national importance. Odisha being a coastal state and prone to cyclone, application of high-performance computing can particularly help in weather forecasting and disaster management," Patnaik said.In recent years, many prominent national level educational institutions like IIT, IIM, AIIMS, NISER, IISER, Institute of Physics, Institute of Mathematics, IMMT and NIT have started functioning in Odisha and many other reputed institutions like BITS have also evinced interest to open their branches in the state.
The Chief Minister said one C-DAC Centre of Excellence has already been set up in VSS University of Technology, Burla. The state government is actively considering the establishment of such high-performance computing and deep learning C-DAC Centres in other state government technical universities and engineering colleges.He said Odisha has been making steady progress in the field of Electronics and Information and Communication Technology.In its bid to draw more investment in IT and Electronics sector, the state government is developing a dedicated Electronic Park near the state capital with state-of-the-art infrastructure and research facilities that will house electronic manufacturing units, he added.He added that the state has also got two IT SEZs with all major IT companies operating from these Special Economic Zones (SEZs).