ACADEMIA

As supercomputing undergoes profound changes, the good folks at Microsoft have been busy. Most notably, they have been listening to extremely valuable customer feedback on and making improvements over the past four months to the cluster version of Windows Server. As a result, Microsoft today released its new version of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Beta 2, designed to speed processing and efficiency of clusters. To learn more, I spoke with Ryan Waite, Product Unit Manager, Microsoft High Performance Computing Group.

Waite said its an exciting time for HPC at Microsoft as they work to put supercomputing power in the hands of those who need it most. His team is focused on helping people harness supercomputing to speed discovery and create competitive advantage from the labs to Wall Street. The company's focus for R2 (the third major HPC server release) is on supercomputing class performance, the ease of use you would expect from Windows and tight integration with existing technology investments and skills.
 
Waite hopes to release the final version this summer. He would like to see a tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint, tuning tools for InfiniBand and workflow efficiency. Microsoft's tool pack called Lizard helps you to determine the LINPACK benchmark that can be achieved by your cluster.

New Feature Highlights:

• Scalability and performance. Microsoft has continued to improve scalability, regularly testing on the 1,000 node cluster in Microsoft Research. They plan to pursue Top500 runs that prove much greater scalability.  They also know customers want to make use of spare processing cycles as part of their overall HPC infrastructures. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Beta 2 now integrates with workstations running Windows 7, enabling organizations to use them as cluster compute nodes.
• Simplified parallelism. HPC starts with parallel code, so his team is particularly excited about next week’s Visual Studio 2010 launch.  Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 empowers parallel development, providing a platform for traditional (batch-based) and service-oriented (interactive) HPC applications.  And, Visual Studio 2010 helps developers create, debug, and trace HPC applications using already-familiar tools.
• Excel integration and ease of use. Whenever Waite speaks with scientists, engineers, and analysts about their HPC needs he hears how they rely on Microsoft Excel for computations and how they would love to scale those computations to run in parallel on a cluster. Microsoft has responded with HPC Services for Excel 2010.  Top systems integrators and consultants like Wipro, Infusion and Grid Dynamics are now ready to help customers deploy and take advantage of HPC Services for Excel 2010.
• Interoperability options. Waite has heard from customers that "rip and replace" isn't often a viable option for building out their clusters.  So, they have started collaborating with industry-leading HPC management companies like Adaptive Computing, Clustercorp and Platform Computing to enable hybrid options where Windows HPC Server and Linux work together.  Whether it’s a dual boot or dynamic cluster, hybrid options help organizations get more out of HPC investments and provide broader access to HPC resources.

More details are included in Waite's slides.

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SC Online wishes to thank Ryan Waite for his time and insights.