Centre for Development of Advanced Computing also know as C-DAC is an autonomous scientific society of Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India.
For me, it all started in December 2017 as I had to do an internship for 6 months to be done with my M.Sc Computer Applications. So after irritating my college authorities as much as I could, I finally got a green signal from college to go work with C-DAC. The basic concept behind this was that I wanted to do something good instead of doing anything. And so the story began and I joined my internship on 4th December 2017. I was assigned to a Group called HPC-I&E under Dr Sandeep K. Joshi. Now a brief intro about HPC-I&E, HPC-I&E is the short form of High-Performance Computing Infrastructure and Engineering. This team basically takes care of the internal infrastructure of C-DAC, You might have seen the cat fixing computer memes on the internet which says “Don’t worry I from Tech support!”
Yes! That was what the Group did, This was a group of system administrators who used to run around the facility to keep things working properly.
The first day was quite confusing for me, as I had no clue and everyone in the office was going somewhere or other and I was the one who looked a bit out of place. By the end of the day, I was assigned a place. I had asked for a spare screen as it helped me to read the documentation on one screen and change code on another. But the setup of my desk kept on changing with time and availability of resources. I have to say I will surely miss the LG screen on my next job.
In my project, I had to analyze DHCP and Firewall logs and detect problems in the infrastructure and help the team to fix issues. This was one of the best projects which I had worked on till date. It helped me to think in terms of supercomputing problems. All my so-called handy tricks to analyze text files had failed on day one itself. It was time for the old dog to learn new tricks. During my entire stay at C-DAC, I never felt as if I was an outsider. The team took really good care of me and welcomed me with open arms, starting from Dr Venkatesh Shenoi who was always there to guide me on documentation and remind me to take lunch, Dhairya who always made sure I reached home on time. At C-DAC I basically worked with R and Elastic Stack as far as the technology stack was concerned. Where I had some knowledge of R and no knowledge of Elastic Stack. I had fun learning Elastic Stack. I often had long-lasting discussions with Sandeep Sir to get more resources to analyze the data. And often had to pursue him for couple days but anyway I used to get my work done. The biggest blunder I did at C- DAC was we when I had crashed a half a Terabyte sever on the same day on which I was given access to it. This was the biggest learning I got at C-DAC which was to control my excitement towards new resources. I still feel bad for what I did and the problem caused by it. But anyway it was fixed within 2 hours.
Later in my internship, this was the biggest asset to me. It allowed me to work even more efficiently and quickly. Now the shortcomings were not on the resources front it was more on the analysis front. This was the start of the three months long period where I tried to analyze every aspect of the data given to me and I hope I did it exceptionally well. It was more like what Sandeep Sir often said:
“You have to run behind things as if they were your girlfriend then and only then things will be done.”
But like all good things my internship also had to end. So on 31st May 2018, I was relieved out of all my duties with some good memories and a whole lot of knowledge.