My Romance with C-DAC

Rajkumar Buyya was with C-DAC some years and was involved in the R & D activities. He is presently in Melbourne, Australia in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University.

I am pleased to learn about the C-DAC’s thirteen years of successful R&D activities in high performance computing that has gained national and international reputation. There are numerous memorable moments that I have encountered during my stay at C-DAC or later due to the C-DAC’s legacy knowledge that I gained. I joined C-DAC, Bangalore in early 1995 as a Graduate Student Trainee and worked on POSIX standard threads implementation on PARAS Microkernel operating system under the supervision and guidance of Mr. Mohan Ram, who was then coordinator for the Operating Systems Group. During this time, I fell in love with C-DAC and joined as the Member Technical Staff in the month of October 1995 and my romance with C-DAC continued until March 1998. I moved to Australia to undertake my doctoral research and I will certainly seek another opportunity to work with C-DAC again on my return to the country.

C-DAC certainly has a modern culture and offers outstanding and state-of-the-art facilities for conducting R&D of international standards. I was involved in the development of system software tools for PARAM 10000 cluster-based super-computers. During 1997-98, I was given an opportunity to lead a team that developed Java-based cluster management software called PARMON. I hope that PARMON users, particularly customers, are finding it useful. The results of our work have been reported in a respected international journal: Software: Practice and Experience. On many occasions, I was given opportunities to present our R&D work at C-DAC at conferences both nationally and internationally. When we say, “I work(ed) for C-DAC”, I personally felt that people regard us highly due to our association with C-DAC. The experience that I gained at C-DAC has helped me in establishing myself internationally. During the last days of my stay at C-DAC, I developed a blueprint for a book entitled “High Performance Cluster Computing” that has been published in 1999 by Prentice Hall in the United States. This book has been adopted in graduate level courses by many universities around the globe including, Cornell University in USA and IITs/IISc. It helped me co-found an international forum under the aegis of the IEEE Computer Society, called IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC). Last year, I hosted Grid Computing (GRID 2000) international meeting in Bangalore and C-DAC has offered generous support. In principle, I still enjoy support from C-DAC for my R&D activities and feel like a C-DAC member despite being away from the country. I would like to thank all C-DAC colleagues for their support and also for nurturing the organization for what it is today and continue to maintain its leadership role in developing advanced computing technologies. Wish you all the best.