This cluster was built as part of the Xth plan project ILGTI of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. We are greatful to the Department of  Atomic Energy (DAE) of the Governement of India for the funding at the level of 3.5 crores of rupees.

From the very beginning  elaborate discussions with Professor Jasjeet Bagla of  HRI were crucial in understanding the intricacies of building large clusters and to give us the confidence to undertake this venture. He continues to be of great help and support.

We are deeply indebted to Jerry Wu, Daniel Chang, Ivan Tay, Charles Liang, Kenny Cheng and others from Supermicro, as well as Simen Thoresen, Sven Erik Johansen  of Dolphinics, Norway for continued technical support and troubleshooting of the most intricate kind.

We are extremely thankful to Knut Petersen of Dolphinics, Norway for friendly negotiations and very prompt delivery of the Wulfkit hardware. It was in fact a chance meeting with Knut in December 2002 that finally convinced us of SCI as the networking choice.

We are thankful to Amal D'Silva of Summation Enterprises and Sanjay Lodha of Netweb Technologies for very prompt and efficient installation. An extra thanks to Sanjay  Lodha for his untiring assurances to succesfully overcome all problems and for dealing with the project as if it were his own project.

We are also deeply indebted to Professors Sandor Katz (DESY, Germany), Ole Holm Nielsen of the Danish Technical University(DTU),  Denmark  and Steve Gottlieb(Indiana) for innumerable discussions which  were critical in  making  design choices.

The design of the cluster owed a lot to the large number of benchmarkings that were done. We are extremely greatful to Kaura, Dhekne, Rajesh and Sanjay of BARC for their help and cooperation in running many benchmarks on their Xeon cluster. We are also thankful to Seetharama Krishna, Dixit, Anup Bansal , Mohan Ram and R.K. Arora of CDAC for the benchmarks done on their Param Padma. Thanks are also due to John Foe of Cray and Venkat of Hinditron for the extensive benchmarkings on Cray X1.

We are extemely thankful to Jagadish Babu and Greg Henry of Intel for their inputs on performance optimisation on  Intel Xeons and to Jagadish Babu and Gopal of Intel for their continued interest in our cluster. We are also thankful to David Scott of Intel for his advice on optimizing our codes.

Whenever needed Dr G. Subramoniam and B. Raveendra Reddy from IMSc have  offered useful assistance. Ravi's help with the Systemimager saved us precious time during the final integration.

Mr S. Mohan  from IMSc was responsible for making  power and air-conditioning arrangements. Mr Arangarajan  of IMSc was in charge of site preparation. Air-conditioning was provided by Ms Blue Star Ltd. The racks and UPS were supplied by Ms APC Ltd. Our thanks are due to Suresh Kumar, Satheesh, Raja Srinivasan and Tamilselvam of Blue Star, and Velu , Dominic Rosario and Shaheen Meeran of APC.

Our thanks are to Sri Koteswara Rao for useful advice on site preparation.

Our thanks are to many members of Service Care for their hard work in moving hardware and for the velectricians of the institute for continued support.

We are particularly indebted to Mr T.V. Shanmugasundaram of IGCAR, Kalpakkam for providing meticulous help in troubleshooting  power supply issues.

Mr Ramakrishna Manja, Registrar and Mr T. Vasudevan, Purchase Officer have been instrumental in ensuring expeditious handling of the huge amount of
paperwork involved.

The members of the Computer Committee,  V. Arvind, H.S. Sharatchandra, V. Raman, K. Srinivas, R. Basu, G. Subramoniam , Raveendra Reddy  and N.D. Hari Dass (Chairman) have put in an enormous amount of effort in the technical evaluation of tenders and in the eventual selection. Many greatful thanks to all of them.

Many thanks to family members of everyone who participated in this mammoth project and to innumerable friends for their emotional support and the great interest shown by them about the cluster.
Last but not the least, we are thankful to Professor R. Balasubramaniam, Director, IMSc, for institutional support.