Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Microsoft Edges Further into HPC

News

Microsoft Edges Further into HPC

6/11/2008

By David Nagel

Center for Autonomic Computing, a collaborative effort between Rutgers, the University of Arizona, and the University of Florida;
  • A project at Rutgers that allows students to explore autonomic concepts focused on data center systems;
  • University of Arizona's Autonomic Computing Laboratory (formerly the High Performance Distributed Computing Lab), which is using CCS 2003 in projects largely centered around climate change and ecology;
  • University of Washington's Daggett Research Group, whose research focuses on protein folding and stability, and which has recently added two CCS 2003-based systems to its HPC arsenal;
  • University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which is using Microsoft HPC++ Computational Finance Lab for modeling and analysis of market data, using models deployed via SharePoint Server via a 256-core cluster;
  • University of Washington, which has also used the HPC++ CompFin Lab for exploring "mortgage pricing techniques as well as the effect that mortgage default and prepayment have on mortgage pools," according to Microsoft;
  • The Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University, which last summer ran an "HPC boot camp" for high schoolers using CCS 2003 on Dell systems, enabling students to build their own small-scale HPC clusters for running simple code; and
  • University of Iowa's Medical Imaging HPC & Informatics Laboratory, which is using CCS 2003 on research aimed at improving digital medical imaging.

    • Those using CCS 2003 who participate in Microsoft's Software Assurance program will be able to migrate automatically to HPC Server 2008 when it's released later this year. Rutgers will be among those making the transition.

    "We are looking forward to moving to Windows HPC Server 2008 when it becomes available specifically for research at the Center for Autonomic Computing at Rutgers," said Manish Parashar, a Rutgers professor and co-director of the Center for Autonomic Computing, in a statement released today. "HPC Server 2008 will provide us with some key capabilities such as integrated virtualization support, which we can use to support a wide class of applications. It will also provide us with interesting autonomic behaviors for power and energy management, performance and productivity management, and dynamic on-demand scaling."

    "Microsoft has been focused on working with education throughout our history," Microsoft's Hammond told us. "HPC is a new space for us, but it crosses over into our core platform." HPC Server 2008 is built on Windows Server 2008, a fact that, according to Hammond, will make the migration path less complex. "We're hopeful that we'll have a rapid transition to 2008 when it becomes available. We're trying to take the power, ease of use, and optimization of the Microsoft platform and apply it to challenges universities are facing."


    About the author: Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at dnagel@1105media.com.

    Have any additional questions? Want to share your story? Want to pass along a news tip? Contact Dave Nagel, executive editor, at dnagel@1105media.com.

    Cite this Site

    David Nagel, "Microsoft Edges Further into HPC," Campus Technology, 6/11/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=64252

    copy text (above) for proper citation



    Recommended Reading
    • Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck

      Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.

    • U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells

      The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.

    • George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum

      George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.

    • Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator

      The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.

    • ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard

      ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.

    • Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month

      Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.

    Related Articles

    send e-mail link to articleEmail this article

    print this articlePrintable Format