The road to smart cities

In less than two months since ₹7,060 crore was allocated to shaping the ‘100 Smart Cities’ vision, a deal has already been inked with Japan to transform Varanasi into a smart heritage city based on the Kyoto model. Modernising mid-sized cities will require precision planning and effective disbursement of funds; technology will play a crucial role too.

A vital ingredient in achieving the vision will be information and communications technology.

It’s a choice between what India is (in)famous for, the

jugaad system, and what the world’s finest engineering is offering today in India — at competitive prices.

Flawless execution of the vision will require massive computing power: from start to finish.

Jugaad would probably involve using the same general purpose computers to run complex processes. The opportunity to make technical advances involves the latest systems that are data intensive and involve complex algorithms.

That really is what the project, Smart Cities, will involve: from satellite imagery to seismic modelling, from traffic management to emergency response, from utilities to civic amenities, from biometrics and image processing to anti-terror measures, from ... well the list can go on.

Multilevel planning

Graphics processing units (GPU) are optimised for these compute-intensive tasks. In practice, what this will achieve is, for instance, a monsoon prediction algorithm that would take over half a day to throw up results with a conventional computer — now done in less than an hour, using a GPU.

Today, we live in a world where terrorism and anti-social activities are a constant threat. Lives are saved or lost on split-second decisions.

Such decisions can only be handled well with the support of advanced technologies in facial recognition and big-data analytics that can sift through volumes of mind-numbing data to produce nuggets of priceless information.

Or take aircraft systems, costly to build and costly to maintain, and imagine the savings that could be ploughed back into innovation.

GPUs also offer other important benefits like lower total cost of ownership — an important consideration in most undertakings, and a chance to build greener computing systems in comparison with more conventional supercomputers. Take a look at the 500 greenest supercomputers in the world, and you’ll see that the top 12 are equipped with GPUs.

In India too, this ability of GPUs has caught the attention of scientists and engineers at premier research and educational institutes such as ISRO, DRDO, DAE, ICAR, the IITs and top universities.

The Indian IT opportunity

The next logical step is to take the message to the top decision-makers in government, as many of India’s e-governance projects are very amenable to the use of GPUs.

India’s finest IT services companies are all very aware of the modern uses of the GPU. They are already are building up strong centres of excellence in the applications of GPUs to modern scenarios — from big data analytics to a range of high-performance computing areas.

This is also a chance for the Indian software services companies to step up and lend their shoulders to an effort that is larger than the sum of their achievements as software exporters.

History shows us that nations have prevailed on the superiority of their intellectual property. In the decades to come, supercomputing and its applications will be at the heart of many areas of intellectual property generation.

From advance defence applications to biopharmaceuticals research, those with the best supercomputers will have an edge. Indian IT companies can help build for India this ‘soft power’ as the country strives to take its rightful place as a world leader.

The writer is the managing director, Asia South, of NVIDIA