The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
June 18, 2008
Microsoft's Big Day
On Wednesday Microsoft announced something big in a little number. NCSA put one of its systems, the 9,000+ core Abe system, on the latest TOP500 list at number 23. The system performed at 68.5 TFLOPS on the HPL, the TOP500 metric of merit. According to Ryan Waite, group program manager for HPC at Microsoft, the software giant's HPC team is especially proud to put a Windows HPC Server system that high on the list, and to see it run with nearly 77 percent efficiency. This is the highest ranking Windows HPC system to date.
Waite also pointed to the efficiency of another large Windows HPC Server system in double-digit seats on the TOP500 list. Umea University in northern Sweden placed their 5,376 core system at number 39 with 85.5 percent efficiency; according to Microsoft those figures make this the most efficient x86-based cluster in the TOP500. The Umea system is the second largest Windows HPC system ever built and marks the first time that Windows HPC Server has been announced on IBM hardware (Umea's system is a Xeon-based cluster from IBM).
NCSA is running Beta 1 of Windows HPC Server 2008 on this system. Robert Pennington, deputy director of the NCSA, said in a prepared statement that "Our experience with Windows HPC Server 2008 has been impressive.... When we deployed Windows on our cluster, which has more than 1,000 nodes, we went from bare metal to running the LINPACK benchmark programs in just four hours. The performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 has yielded efficiencies that are among the highest we've seen for this class of machine."
Microsoft also announced today that the Release Candidate for HPC Server will be available for download from their Web site the last week of June. Waite pointed to the extensive developments that have gone into HPC Server to ensure performance at scale. On the networking side, Microsoft has developed NetworkDirect RDMA, a new remote direct memory access interface protocol. Microsoft has partnered with vendors of a variety of networking hardware, including NetEffect, Mellanox and Myricom, in developing and proving NetworkDirect. NetEffect announced its support for NetworkDirect in its 10 GbE line last week, and Mellanox is demonstrating 2 microsecond latency and 2 GB per second throughput on its new ConnectX IB cards this week at ISC.
Microsoft has also invested a lot of effort engineering the shared memory interface in MPI to be more effective, especially for multicore processors. "Many of the customers we are talking to have existing MPI codes that they don't want to re-tool," said Waite. "For these customers it is critical that MPI be as effective as possible." Interestingly, Microsoft is contributing its changes back to the MPICH community.
Other key technologies in the latest version of HPC Server include deployment and management tools, batch and service-oriented job management, and reliability features such as head node failover.
So, who is using HPC Server anyway? According to Waite, he is seeing more customers getting experience with the beta, including many users deploying on clusters with more than 200 nodes. Users include groups from national labs, research universities, engineering users running COTS packages such as FLUENT, and the oil and gas industry. One interesting customer is a large medical organization that is integrating its HPC operations into its overall IT offering. "This customer in particular is a good example of how HPC is becoming part of the general fabric of enterprise computing," explains Waite.
NCSA's Merle Giles echoes this point in a video released with the announcement, "The significance of the TOP500 run using a Windows operating system is that it opens the possibilities for other industries to utilize HPC that may not have been thinking of it.... As companies want to migrate from what may be on a desktop to what may be in the HPC environment, Windows becomes very important."
The final production release of HPC Server 2008 is expected later this year.
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
White Paper: HPC in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Learn how the Appro GreenBlade™ System helps consolidate server, storage, network, power and simplified management capabilities in a single package while providing the performance-density, energy-efficiency and best ROI for your business.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
Book Review: Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications
Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications, edited by David A. Bader, is the first book in CRC's Computational Science Series, edited by Horst Simon. Although the book is a collection of papers, Bader has done an excellent job of creating a compilation that holds together and covers a broad topic very well.
Read More...
The Week in Review
Cilk++ used in parallelization of the FP-tree algorithm for pattern mining; Istanbul benchmark results posted; and the latest on the NVIDIA Tesla shortage. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...
A Trio of HPC Offerings Unveiled at ISC
Last week's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) was a convenient excuse for vendors to announce a raft of new products, but three, in particular, stood out.
Read More...
Top Headlines
Cloudy With a Chance of HPC
Jul 01 | GenomeWeb Daily News | The popularity of cloud computing in the life sciences community was on full display at April's Bio-IT World conference. Read more...
HPC From the Beach
Jul 01 | Linux Magazine | How can getting to the ocean help with HPC computing? Read more...
DARPA Investigates Extreme Supercomputing
Jun 29 | GCN.com | Agency issues RFI for "Ubiquitous High Performance Computing" systems. Read more...
Supercomputers Go From Biggest to Cheapest
Jun 29 | Computerworld | The bottom of the TOP500 reveals the coming revolution in truly accessible high-end computing. Read more...
CPUs Gear Up For -- and Some Avoid -- Hot Chips
Jun 18 | EE Times | Parallel software also takes spotlight at Stanford confab. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Data Center Manager
National Renewable Energy Laboratory -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 08, 2009
Data Mining: Failure to Launch
WWW
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA