Spotlight on Prof. S.N. Maheshwari, May 2017
Mr Rakesh Khurana, Chief Architect for Passenger Reservation System at Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), talks about collaborating with Prof S N Maheshwari in creating a single nationwide train reservation system
25th May 2017
Bio
Rakesh Khurana is an accomplished Technology Leader with a proven track record
of successfully taking on challenging responsibilities of implementing large
scale and complex IT Systems for both Government and Corporate Sectors. He
successfully led and managed the development, implementation and operations
support of the Indian Railways Passenger Reservations System. He is currently
in the role of a Global CIO for a very large, global Tier 1 Auto Ancillary
manufacturer which supplies parts to practically all leading Automotive OEMs of
the world. Mr Khurana received his BTech from IIT D in 1983 and an MTech in
CS&E from IIT D in 1991.
1. Can you tell us in brief what the scope of the railway reservation
project was, what your role in it was.
The Passenger Reservation System (PRS) of Indian Railways was developed and
deployed
in 1985 by the Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC). The system was
implemented at five different Server locations across India - New Delhi,
Mumbai, Secunderabad, Calcutta and Chennai, each managed and operated by a
separate geographical division of the Indian Railways. These were five
independent stand-alone systems catering to reservations for trains originating
from within the geographical region associated with the server where the system
was
installed.
In the early 1990s the Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) was
charged with the
responsibility of networking all these five PRS systems for the purpose of
creating a Distributed Passenger Reservation System by integrating all the
separate systems and their databases. Thus CONCERT (Countrywide Network of
Computerized Enquiry and Reservation Terminals) was born which fully replaced
the existing system in 1999 enabling bookings from anywhere to anywhere from
across any Railway Reservation Office in the country. CRIS had been mandated to
continue with the existing hardware platform which were DEC VAX/VMS systems.
The architecture of the initial PRS system did not allow for such a federated
database based transaction processing model. Fundamental changes to the
architecture and consequently the design and programming of the systems had to
be done to achieve this. A Transaction Processing Monitor - DEC's Reliable
Transaction Router (RTR) - was introduced to support highly reliable
distributed transaction processing. I was the Chief Project Manager and the
Architect of this project and was involved from the very beginning of the
project - right from the time of conceiving the project based on IR's
requirement, through to its development, trial runs and then complete
implementation across all the server locations. I built a new team from
scratch to get this implemented. The entire project was developed in-house by
the team at CRIS which was managed by me.
2. When and why was IIT Delhi approached for involvement in this project?
How did Prof Maheshwari get involved in the process?
One of the key requirements of the system was to have a highly scalable,
reliable and high performance filing system. Since the system was meant to
withstand high level of concurrent usage, especially during peak hours, the
need was to choose the right file system which would enable a high throughput
of transactions. Those were the days when the computing power and storage
access speeds were not as powerful as they are today. Also, RDBMS technology
had not matured enough to be in the reckoning for heavy concurrent usage OLTP
systems. The OLTP systems of those days developed by IBM, UNISYS etc. were all
based on proprietary flat file systems.
To address the challenge of
building a very efficient file system Professor Maheshwari, whom CRIS had
engaged as a technology consultant, suggested an appropriate in-memory index
based Dynamic Hashing (DHASH) based file system. He guided the team through the
development of this high performance file system which was used to store
millions of Passenger Name Records (PNRs). Professor Maheshwari's inputs,
provided as part of comprehensive and critical reviews of the system, were
absolutely critical to the realization of this ambitious and critical project
for Indian Railways.
My association with Prof Maheshwari was since my B.Tech days and subsequently
he was
also my guide for my M.Tech project. He was very excited about this project and
I remember discussing with him the challenges we had been facing for which he
would provide very useful advice. Subsequently he agreed for an engagement
with CRIS as a consultant for the new generation PRS.
3. Can you share what the experience of working with academia partners was like
for you on such a major project? Any interesting stories/anecdotes to relate?
Professor Maheshwari's involvement and guidance was absolutely critical to the
success of this project. His guidance and inputs from contemporary academic
research in highly critical areas clearly made the difference between the
success and failure of the project. The choice of the right algorithm, the
critical reviews to ensure that the implementation is such that it mirrors the
key concept behind the hashing algorithm were all ensured by Professor
Maheshwari. The eventual proof of this is in the fact that the system is still
being used close to two decades after
it was developed and has survived not only exponential growth in its usage but
also fast paced evolution in computing related technologies.
4. How do you view the changed technology scenario since the time this
project was
undertaken? What kind of role do you see for IITD in it?
I am convinced that Academia has a highly critical role in the industry. Most
of the innovation that we see today is based on academic research which has
been in the works in previous decades. Today we are seeing the industry
exploiting concepts that are based out of academic research performed in
institutions such as IITD - whether it is in the area of Artificial
Intelligence, Cognitive Computing, Semantic Computing, Machine Learning,
Robotics, Bio-informatics, nano technologies, Virtual reality etc.
In the hyper competitive business landscape of today's globalized world, the
reality today is that Companies need innovation not just to thrive but even to
survive. Hence corporate houses today are keen to tie up with academic
institutions of excellence such as IITD for joint research and consultancy.