Cloud Computing

­Let's say you're an executive at a large corporation. Your particular responsibilities include making sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buying computers for everyone isn't enough -- you also have to purchase software or software licenses to give employees the tools they require.

Whenever you have a new hire, you have to buy more software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It's so stressful that you find it difficult to go to sleep on your huge pile of money every night. Soon, there may be an alternative for executives like you. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application.

That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry.

In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead.

Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

Nanoscience

Nanoscience has the potential to become the sunrise sector in the years ahead. “From converting sunlight into power, to targeting a drug to a single malignant cell, from creating sensors in the form of biochip to the ability to produce garments which can act as a chemical shield, possibilities are immense in this (nanotechnology) domain.

In the field of nanoscience, it is material versus molecule. Nanoscientists operate from either of these major vantage points. Some are excited about the behaviour of materials, when brought down to nano levels. In other words, nanoscientists deal with reducing materials to nanosizes and observing the changes in their properties and behaviour.

A leading scientist, contends that, “material such as gold, which is chemically inert at normal scales, can serve as a potent chemical catalyst at nanoscales. Much of the fascination with nanotechnology stems from these different phenomena that matter exhibits at the nanoscale.”

On the other hand, another group of scientists are interested in using nanoscience to assemble individual atoms into a desired molecule so as to evolve molecular-level machines.

But research in this domain is very much in its infancy the world over, and India has negligible presence in the area.

One millionth of a millimetre or 10-9 m, is a nanometre, and study of matter at that level is nanotechnology. Initiated as an idea by Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman in the early 1950s, nanotechnology caught up as a separate discipline only during the early 90s. The nanotechnology initiative set up in 2000, by the US federal government played a crucial role in providing seed funding for long-term research in the area. It has also caught up well in Europe. India was one of the early entrants in the domain, thanks to the pioneering work of Prof. CNR Rao, Linus Pauling Research Professor at JNCASR. As a field of study nanoscience is truly interdisciplinary in nature.

The nature and structure of the course depends upon the area of specialisation that the course focuses on. Normally, the three chief divisions of nanotech are nanomaterials, nanoelectronics and nanobiotechnology. And the concentration of courses would be a function of your specialisation