Intel Academic Community launches Centre of Excellence at MSRIT

BANGALORE, INDIA: The Intel Academic Community announced the launch of its Center of Excellence for faculty training at MSRIT. This Center of Excellence at the MSRIT campus which is fully equipped with latest Intel hardware and software aims to train 300 faculties from 155 institutes of Visveswaraiah Technological University (VTU) on Parallel Programming for Undergraduate curriculum.

Speaking on the occasion, Narendra Bhandari, Director for Asia Pacific of the Intel Software and Services Group, said, "The initiative is a step in the right direction to empower the faculty of Visveswaraiah Technological University with information, knowledge and tools from the world over via a single resourceful community.Source: Intel

The Intel Academic Community already has over 1000 universities as part of the community of which India contributes the highest number at 259. A good example of the power of the community is the efforts of Prof. H.S. Jamadagni from IISc Bangalore. He joined the programme, utilized the tools and developed a world class curriculum on Parallel Programming for his students.

This curriculum is just not beneficial for the IISc students but is also being used now as a reference for developing an undergraduate framework for VTU and other autonomous institutions. Prof Jamadagni is today sharing this curriculum with the online community”

The Center of Excellence at MSRIT along with selected faculty from VTU will develop the undergraduate curriculum based on Prof H. S. Jamadagni’s framework and will train faculties on the same to start curriculum implementation at an undergraduate level by 2010.

Prof. Jamadagni said, “This event is a launching pad for creating a well knit community of professionals from the university and the Industry t propel teaching, research and application of Multicore architecture in the coming years.”

A large repository of curriculum and content created by faculty from several universities worldwide is available on the Intel® Academic Community. Intel is continuously working with several engineering institutes in India to help develop an undergraduate curriculum on Parallel Programming.

The universities enrolled into the Intel Academic Program can avail several benefits like access to several online forums for knowledge exchange and technical support, Parallel Programming course material from Intel which can be incorporated into their curriculum, invitation for relevant Industry events and free licenses for all Intel Software Development Products for the Computer lab amidst several others.

The Center of Excellence is of immense use not only for the faculty but also for the students. The students get a complete overview of multi-core architecture, importance of parallelism, threading concepts and methodology. Besides this students can also avail of the most efficient techniques of performance analysis for multi-core platforms using the latest Intel Software Development Products.

Some of the other leading institutions and universities from India that are a part of the Intel® Academic besides the Visveswaraiah Technological University and IISC are IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, I2IT to name a few.

This unique programme has worked directly with leading universities in 72 countries to conduct research on future technologies. Since March 2007, over 2474 professors have participated worldwide, and over 130,000 students have directly benefited from the parallel programming classes and access to Intel Software Development Tools and new technologies.

ISA initiatives bode well for semicon

When the India Semiconductor Association (ISA) started functioning from way back in Nov. 2004, it had three main objectives. These were: bringing the Indian semicon industry together; ensure that the Indian government paid enough attention to this sector; and finally, putting together a semicon policy.

ISA has since come a long way. S. Janakiraman, president and CEO – R&D Services, Mindtree, and chairman, ISA, says that the ISA is now transitioning into putting systems and processes in place.

The ISA also has three special interest groups, focusing on market research, technology and talent. The market research aspect is more in terms of reference data and in terms of opportunities.

As far as technology aspect is concerned, mixed-signal is fast becoming a reality. The process geometry of semicon has been shrinking from 90nm to 65nm and even 32nm.

Design and manufacturing used to be fairly independent earlier. However, they are fairly coupled now. All of these changes need to be addressed, according to Jani Sir. The ISA SIG on technology would be studying and recommending how to implement, keep track and stay ahead of technology.

Talent is an extremely critical area! The depth of knowledge is in danger of drying out soon! ISA feels that there is a need for a lot of faculty retraining and change in curriculum. The industry also needs to collaborate with the academia.

To address this, ISA has collaborated with the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Karnataka’s nodal body for engineering education to form the the ISA-VTU understanding. This is a comprehensive initiative, which seeks to catalyze talent generation through enhanced industry-academia interaction. The VLSI Society of India (VSI) will partner and support ISA on this initiative in specific areas.

Established in 1998, Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) is headquartered at Belgaum. Presently there are 120 engineering colleges affiliated to VTU. Of these, five colleges offer a post graduate degree in VLSI design and embedded software.

Key aspects of the ISA-VTU initiative are as follows:

* Creation of a Semiconductor Research Consortium-like forum for India that would foster industry-oriented research;
* Facilitation of software acquisition in identified educational institutions;
* Create and support a repository of student projects;
* Faculty development through increased industry interaction and exposure; and
* Augmenting the curriculum evolved by SMDP/ VSI/ Universities in practicals and projects

The ISA also has another program, called the Si-Quest. The Si-Quest is a pioneering semiconductor campus awareness program aimed at talent generation from a broad-based quality talent pool in India. Its nationwide campus coverage, coupled with various awareness campaigns, will attract more and better candidates towards semiconductor industry. All of these bode well for the industry.