News

Microsoft Edges Further Into HPC

• By David Nagel
• June 11, 2008

Microsoft pointed to gains in the high-performance computing (HPC) market as it readies the release of its HPC Server 2008 for later this year. On Wednesday, Microsoft released details of nine HPC projects in higher education that are using Microsoft's current Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS 2003) product. The projects all launched within the last nine months.

We spoke with Microsoft yesterday about the schedule for HPC Server 2008's release, and a representative said it's still on target for this year, although an announcement for the specific release date is "still a few months out." HPC Server 2008 is scheduled for release in the second half of 2008 and will be the successor to CCS 2003.

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 pointed to nine projects in the United States that have been implemented over the last nine months or so.

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 University will be among those making the transition.

"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," said Manish Parashar, a Rutgers professor and co-director of the Center for Autonomic Computing, in a statement released today. "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," Hammond said. "We're trying to take the power, ease of use, and optimization of the Microsoft platform and apply it to challenges universities are facing."