HOUSTON, SEPTEMBER 22, 2004
PTI
NRI Press
Seven scientists of Indian origin, including Srinidhi
Varadarajan who built a super computer from off-the-shelf
commercial products, were named among the world's top 100 young researchers
by Technology Review , a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT).
An annual event by the prestigious institute, these honours have been
conferred on the basis of exceptional talent in fields like bio-technology,
medicine, nanotechnology and computing. 69 men and 31 wo-men were selected
from a pool of 500 nominations for this year's honour.
Besides Varadarajan, the other researchers of Indian origin
are Anuj Batra, Ramesh Raskar, Chaitali Sengupta, Ravi Kane, Vikram
Sheel Kumar and Ananth Natarajan. Varadarajan, director of Terascale
Computing Facility, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
conceived and built the world's third fastest supercomputer from a cluster
of 1,100 Apple Macintoshes. The project cost around $5 million, whereas
world-class supercomputers cost around $100 million or more.
The young researcher used off-the-shelf commercial products to design
the supercomputer in less than three months as he did not have the hundreds
of millions of dollars for the purpose. Batra, 34, is a Systems
Engineer at Texas Instruments.
He leads one of the industry's top teams advancing ultra wideband wireless
technology which provides the high-speed needed for streaming media
applications with low power consumption.
Raskar, 34, a visiting research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric,
has built large computer display systems that seamlessly combine images
from multiple projectors. His image-processing and graphics research
may lead to new applications in entertainment, image-guided surgery
and user interfaces.