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 cdac pune she joined as a member of its technical staff but soon realised that her work on modelling required knowledge of computer languages and programsi 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 saysin 2005 several senior cdac 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 finetuning 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 saysricha now heads the highperformance computing seismic data processing group in cdac and is busy finetuning indigenous software that will help indian oil companies reduce offshore exploration costs drastically currently the companies pay huge sums for foreign softwareher 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 madeonce 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