Order Now!
Windows 7 for XP ProfessionalsUpdating Support Skills from XP to Windows 7by Bink.nu's Raymond Comvalius
There are 92 guest(s) online.
There are 0 member(s) online.
Betas of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and distributed Microsoft Office Excel 2010 for the cluster available for download, delivering increased performance and productivity.
At Supercomputing 2009, Microsoft Corp. announced the immediate availability of betas for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and distributed Microsoft Office Excel 2010 for the cluster. Together with the recently announced Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta, which helps simplify parallel programming, these advances make it possible for more users to access supercomputing power through familiar technologies and tools such as Microsoft Office Excel, Windows Server and Visual Studio.
“Until now, the power of high-performance and parallel computing has largely been available to a limited subset of customers due to the complexity of environments and applications, as well as the challenges of parallel programming,” said Vince Mendillo, senior director of High Performance Computing at Microsoft. “Today, we’re seeing performance numbers that rival Linux from micro-kernel benchmarks to independent software vendor (ISV) benchmarks. We have a dedicated performance lab at Microsoft, and ISVs are seeing 30 percent to 40 percent performance improvements in the speed of their code on Windows HPC Server.”
Although multicore systems are becoming ubiquitous, few developers can build parallel applications that truly leverage the available resources. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 will help make parallel programming simpler and more efficient for a broad base of developers across both client and cluster workloads. In addition, by moving Microsoft Office Excel 2010 to the cluster, customers are seeing linear performance scaling of complex spreadsheets — spreadsheets that before would take weeks to complete, and which are now completing their calculations in a few hours.
By making supercomputing easier and more accessible, Microsoft is helping build a vibrant ecosystem for developers and partners to find their own business opportunities that accelerate the pace of research, development and discovery in organizations of all sizes. Last week, Cray Inc. launched the Cray CX1-iWS system, a new generation of workstation sold exclusively through Dell Inc., which combines a powerful Windows 7-based workstation with a fully interoperable high-performance computing cluster running Windows HPC Server 2008. Similarly, Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Ltd., recently announced that it has formed a relationship with Microsoft to address the growing high-performance and parallel computing segment. Wipro will enable customers to migrate to Windows HPC Server 2008 by offering services for application porting, optimization, application development, and cluster deployment and management.
Full story at source: Microsoft Broadens Supercomputing Reach Through New Offerings Betas of Windows HPC Server 2008 R
Helping engineers in oil and gas tackle growing volumes of data, Microsoft Corp. today announced at the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition that it has added three upstream independent software vendors (ISVs) to its growing high-performance computing (HPC) partner ecosystem.
The new ISVs — Computer Modelling Group Ltd. (CMG), Roxar and SPT Group — have recently converted their reservoir simulation software solutions to run on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 to help deliver more accessible HPC capabilities to the upstream oil and gas industry. In fact, more than 80 percent of oil and gas industry experts surveyed* early this year found that more ready access HPC capability could increase oil and gas production.
“Amplifying the impact of professionals across asset teams is of critical importance to oil and gas companies today,” said Craig Hodges, U.S. energy industry solutions director at Microsoft. “By building their reservoir modeling solutions to run on Windows Compute Cluster Server, these partners provide engineers and geoscientists with accessible high-performance computing resources — at the division, workgroup and desktop levels — and empower them to more easily submit and run jobs, and analyze and gain insights to make better reservoir management decisions faster.”
Built to easily integrate into a firm’s existing Windows environment, Windows Compute Cluster Server-based HPC makes it quick and easy for engineers and geoscientists to deploy compute clusters, submit simulation jobs and monitor their status. Windows Compute Cluster Server-based reservoir simulation software solutions are easy to use and integrate with existing infrastructures, quickly and more accurately than ever before.
New industry partners with reservoir simulation software solutions that run on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 are the following: Continue At Source
See also:
Microsoft Corp. today released the first public beta of Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, a server operating system and tools designed for the fast-growing high-performance computing (HPC) market. Microsoft also established the Parallel Computing Initiative, a program creating a set of common development tools across multicore desktops and clusters.
Windows HPC Server 2008, the successor to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, is based on the Windows Server 2008 operating system and is designed to increase productivity, scalability and manageability. Windows HPC Server 2008 has been renamed to reflect its readiness to tackle the most challenging HPC workloads. Key features are new high-speed networking, highly efficient and scalable cluster management tools, advanced failover capabilities, a service oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler, and support for partners’ clustered file systems. The beta is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/hpc; the final version will be generally available in the second half of 2008.
“With the new advancements, Windows HPC Server 2008 can allow customers to achieve the levels of scalability and performance of the most efficient clusters in the Top500 benchmark while making it dramatically more productive to deploy, utilize and integrate the advanced HPC clusters within their environment,” said Kyril Faenov, general manager of HPC at Microsoft. “By upgrading to Windows HPC Server 2008 on our 2,048-core production test cluster, we increased the LINPACK performance by 30 percent and were able to deploy and validate the cluster in less than two hours using out-of-the-box software. Expanding beyond traditional MPI-based HPC applications, Windows HPC Server 2008 enables support for high-throughput SOA applications with its advanced Web service routing capability and paves the way for bringing HPC capabilities to a broad range of enterprise applications.”
This efficiency is currently being demonstrated at the Holland Computing Center in the Peter Kiewit Institute at the University of Nebraska, one of the largest clusters in the world. The new 1,151-node Windows-based cluster is expected to enhance the curriculum and resource capabilities by providing compute cycles for a broad variety of government, research and industry uses.
“We see this as a tremendous opportunity to advance the research capabilities of the institute to meet the growing and emerging demands of the university community as well as our business partners,” said John Callahan, director of technical infrastructure for the Peter Kiewit Institute. “The scalability and demonstrated performance of the Windows platform has empowered us to provide a medium through which we can develop and train students in a new specialization on parallel computing.”
Adding to performance, Microsoft is also showcasing the ways cluster administrators, end users and developers can increase productivity with a common set of tools that span the desktop and cluster. Cluster administrators can save time with Microsoft System Center for application-level monitoring and rapid provisioning and SQL Server Reporting Services for capacity planning and auditing. End users can save time with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for data collaboration and the Windows Workflow Foundation for automating processes across workgroups.
Mixed, dual-boot clusters can also improve cluster efficiency. Because dual-boot clusters flexibly serve both Linux and Windows users, they increase utilization rates by expanding their number of addressable users. Examples of customers deploying large mixed clusters include the University of Iowa, Cambridge University, 3M and Baker Hughes Inc. Leading technology partners that have announced mixed cluster support for Windows HPC Server 2008 include Altair Engineering Inc., Cluster Resources Inc. and Platform Computing. Clustered file system vendors that have announced support for Windows include Panasas Inc., Quantum Corp.’s StorNext, HP PolyServe, and Sanbolic Inc., and IBM Corp. has plans to support IBM GPFS on Windows.
Continue At Source
The program will be by invitation and accessible via http://connect.microsoft.com. Independent Software Vendors considering a High Performance Computing solution on Windows may obtain more information by emailing hpcpart@microsoft.com. Learn more about highly scalable parallel computing Microsoft platform technologies at http://www.microsoft.com/hpc.
Microsoft Blog: Actually, the cluster is a dual boot Linux/CCS cluster, which makes it even more interesting than the headline. The machine is reported to have 1,1151 Dell servers with dual-socket Barcelonas for a total of over 9,200 cores and will be housed at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
We recently published a whitepaper which details howto setup such Linux/CCS dual boot cluster. Go grab it @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1457bc0a-eaff-4303-99ed-b199ab1c0857&DisplayLang=en
Microsoft’s high-performance computing business gains adoption across industries.
Fresh off the revelation that Microsoft® high-performance computing (HPC) technologies are being widely adopted by customers, software and hardware partners, a technical leader from Microsoft Corp. today discussed how the foundations of computer science and engineering must be reinvented to deal with the mass-market adoption of processors with many computing cores.
In a keynote address at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, Microsoft technical fellow Dr. Burton Smith talked about new approaches to software development where everyday computer programs must be able to execute in parallel on multiple microprocessor cores, allowing developers to build more powerful, humanistic software applications that incorporate speech, conversation, rich visualization and anticipatory execution of tasks. The many-core inflection point was presented as a new challenge for the computing industry, namely general-purpose parallel computing.
“Our industry and the universities must work together to reinvent not only computing, but also the computing profession,” Dr. Smith said. “The coming years will fundamentally reshape software and transform the way people use and interact with computers. In order for consumers to enjoy performance improvements in the future, mass-market technology providers will have to embrace parallel computing to differentiate and compete. It’s vital that software and hardware adapt to new models of computing.”
Dr. Smith urged commercial vendors to work with the academic and scientific communities to spur the next wave of discovery by creating software, tools and standards to help overcome existing barriers to parallel computing.
Broad Market Adoption for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003
Since general availability in August 2006, Microsoft Windows® Compute Cluster Server (CCS) 2003 has been adopted in financial services, manufacturing, the oil and gas industry, digital content creation, and biosciences, with HPC cluster deployments ranging in size from distributed departmental clusters to shared clusters as large as 7,000 nodes. Recent customers include aQuantive, Areva Challenge, BAE Systems, Boeing, Bombardier Transportation GmbH, Callaway Golf Co., DALCO/Alinghi, Fraunhofer-Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty) Ltd. (PBMR), South Florida Water Management District and UniCredit Group (HVB).
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=266156&pageNumber=1
Hirsch says the NYSE's options business went from spending $2.5 million annually for a hosted mainframe to $200,000 for an in-house distributed system that runs 10 to 20 times faster for real-time applications.
The Archipelago technologists are skilled at high performance, mission-critical Windows operations and have said they expect to replace old systems at the NYSE with more modern technology. See Windows in Financial Services on the Pacfic Exchange, which was acquired by Archipelago
http://www.windowsfs.com/TheMag/tabid/54/ArticleType/ArticleView/ArticleID/1155/PageID/912/Default.aspx
Customers report that Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 makes it easier and more cost effective to develop, deploy and use HPC systems, and they report that a Windows-based HPC platform integrates smoothly with existing IT resources.
Today Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the company’s first product designed specifically for high-performance computing (HPC). With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, Microsoft aims to make it easier to create, integrate and operate HPC clusters within organizations, thereby expanding the technology beyond traditional supercomputing centers by bringing the value of computational clusters within reach of more people.
To understand the impact of today’s milestone, PressPass convened a roundtable of customers who have been test driving Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 in demanding applications, including biomedical research and scientific modeling. Providing their insight are:
Ron Elber, professor of computer science at Cornell University
John Michalakes, senior software engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.
Matt Wortman, director of computational biology and IT at the Genome Research Institute, University of Cincinnati
PressPass: Would each of you begin by briefly describing the work you’re doing as it relates to Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server?
Elber: At Cornell, we have a core facility called the Computational Biology Service Unit (CBSU) that’s dedicated to computational biology and bioinformatics for Cornell researchers. We provide both research and computational support to biology groups. The cluster serves as a platform for computational biology applications used in a range of research activities in bioinformatics. We support many popular applications for sequence-based datamining, population genetics and protein structure prediction. Many of the projects require lengthy calculations, and massively parallel computing helps shorten the clock time and obtain results in a reasonable period. We have developed a Web-based interface that allows biologists to access the applications without any prior knowledge of cluster computing.
Michalakes: About eight years ago, NCAR and a number of partner organizations involved in atmospheric research and operational forecasting began working on a next-generation community weather model and data assimilation system to eventually replace aging model codes in use for forecasting and research. This new model, called the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model, is basically all new software, designed from the outset for HPC systems. WRF is maintained and freely distributed as a community model and is being run at hundreds of institutions across the range of systems, from individual workstations to large supercomputers. Thus, portability and portable performance has been a key concern in the design and implementation of WRF.
Wortman: One of our key focus areas at the Genome Research Institute is drug discovery. Early in the drug-discovery process, millions of chemical compounds are screened against disease targets to identify classes of molecules whose properties and activities guide researchers toward the discovery of new drugs. Our research focuses on applying computational tools to this process to reduce costs and save time. Specifically, we perform virtual in silico screening experiments that simulate the interactions between a disease target and those millions of chemical compounds to predict which compounds participate in desired interactions. The compounds predicted to have the most favorable properties are selected from the chemical library, and then proceed to in vitro testing to confirm the computational predictions. This combination of in silico and in vitro screening is much faster and less expensive than in vitro screening alone because the number of chemicals that need to be tested is reduced by several orders of magnitude. A typical job on our cluster begins when the disease target is sent to the scheduler along with a list of chemicals to be used during the simulation. The head node sends a copy of the disease target and a portion of the chemicals to each node where simulations occur independently. The head node analyzes and ranks the results of each simulation.