Microsoft Edges Further into HPC

• By David Nagel
• 06/11/08

As Microsoft readies the release of its HPC Server 2008 for later this year, the company is showing signs of an increased presence in the high-performance computing market. Wednesday, Microsoft released details of nine HPC projects in higher education using its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, all of which launched within the last nine months.

HPC Server 2008 will be the successor to Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS 2003). Microsoft has said for some time that it will be released in the second half of 2008. We spoke with Microsoft yesterday about the schedule for its release, and a representative said it's still on target for this year, though an announcement for the specific release date is "still a few months out."

HPC Server 2008 went into its first round of beta testing in November. The second stage of the beta program launched just last month. Microsoft told us that it's seen a LINPACK performance increase of 30 percent in HPC Server 2008 (beta 1) compared with CCS 2003. Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's United States education general manager, said that further LINPACK trial results will be released later this month to coincide with the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

It's unknown exactly how many universities are participating in the HPC Server 2008 beta program, but Brian Hammond, Microsoft HPC specialist, said the figure is "in the hundreds."

Meanwhile, CCS 2003 has gained momentum in research institutions, a space that's dominated by Unix and Linux. Microsoft released details of nine projects in the United States that have been implemented over the last nine months or so, one as recently as two weeks ago. These include:

• University of Nebraska, Omaha's Holland Computing Center, which is using a 1,150-node cluster for medical, genetic, and other research projects;
• An NSF-funded project out of the 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."