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Through her degree programme at Meerut University, and even during her MTech in applied geophysics in IIT Roorkee, Richa Rastogi never learnt a computer language. But her MTech subject drew her to seismic modelling, and that brought her to the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Pune. She joined as a member of its technical staff, but soon realised that her work on modelling required knowledge of computer languages and programs.I had to learn from scratch, and it was daunting. I started with C programming, then Linux. Since I was working fulltime, I studied after work. Later, I learned parallel programming, as we work on supercomputers. I would read up the physics behind a topic and then convert it into a program, and use parallel programming to run it on a supercomputer, Richa says.In 2005, several senior C-DAC members left the organisation, and Richa suddenly, at the age of 27, found herself leading a team. I was still learning the computing part. Being a team member is different from leading a team. But I accepted the challenge. The first thing I did, apart from all my regular work and fine-tuning my programming skills, was to read scientific journals related to my field to keep myself updated about new technologies being discovered around the world. I started presenting my own papers at reputed conferences, she says.Richa now heads the high-performance computing seismic data processing group in C-DAC, and is busy fine-tuning indigenous software that will help Indian oil companies reduce offshore exploration costs drastically. Currently, the companies pay huge sums for foreign software.Her team works on a software suite called SeisRTM, which will be used to image Earths subsurface structures. Currently, seismic explorations collect data in search of oil and gas reservoirs, which is then processed by foreign software to create images of the subsurface based on which decisions about drilling locations are made.Once we wrote the software (SeisRTM), we needed to test it. We are getting the datasets to test our software from ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation). After processing it, we will send the images back to ONGC so that they can validate our results using the software they are currently operating with. The best part about this software is that it is easily customisable, unlike the ones we buy or take on a licence from abroad, Richa says.

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