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.