HPCwire: Microsoft's Big Day

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Special Features >> ISC >> ISC Features

June 18, 2008

Microsoft's Big Day

by John E. West, for HPCwire

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

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html