September 21, 2010
At the High Performance Computing Financial Markets conference in New York this week, Microsoft announced the third release of its Windows server operating system for technical computing, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. And hot on the heels of that announcement were the usual slew of partner announcements from the likes of Cray, SGI, Adaptive Computing, Revolution Analytics, and Structured Data.
Writer Timothy Prickett Morgan covered the story for the Register, reporting on the strong positive response from the Wall Street crowd who were eager to try out the product. Many chose not to wait for the official release as evidenced by the several hundred users who participated in Microsoft's open beta program.
HPC Services for Excel 2010 is one of the highlights of the new release. It reduces calculation time of complex spreadsheets by dispatching the work from a Windows XP, Vista, or 7 workstation to a cluster of x64 servers running the lastest HPC Server. The feature will be especially attractive to the heavy users of complex spreadsheet models, the quantitative analysts (aka "quants") of Wall Street. Morgan noted that in a product demonstration given by Microsoft, a price sensitivity Excel workbook calculation that would have taken two hours to run on an eight-core Windows workstation was completed in under two minutes by offloading much of the calculation to a 500-node server cluster back at Microsoft headquarters.
Much coverage has been given to the cloud-bursting features of the lastest HPC Server variant and how this relates to Microsoft's Azure platform and overall cloud strategy. Writes Morgan:
At the event, Microsoft also showed a technology preview of a capability that is due in the next release of HPC Server 2008 that will allow clusters running the Microsoft supercomputing stack to burst applications out onto its Azure cloud. Adding Azure to the cluster will be no more difficult than plugging in your account information for Azure into the HPC Server console, feeding it a node template, and dispatching the software stack running on your internal cluster out to Azure. (This part takes time, obviously). But once the Azure nodes are configured with your software, they look and act the same as the nodes in your local cluster.
Ryan White, group program manager for high performance computing at Microsoft, says that the company will allow HPC Server 2008 to burst to other clouds, not just Azure. SGI's Cyclone cloud is on the list of future supported platforms, as is Amazon's EC2 cloud and Numbus Technology's Mezeo storage cloud.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 can also distribute computational workloads on Windows 7 PCs. This functionality is not supported on other Windows platforms (XP or Vista) or on Mac or Linux-based systems. Still, it's a neat program, comparable to a volunteer computing program, such as SETI@home. It can even be configured to stop processing when the user moves the mouse.
Full story at The Register
Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...
Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?
Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.