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ShareMicrosoft Windows HPC Beta On Par with Linux
Posted by Edward J. Correia on November 19, 2009
Microsoft might be yielding slivers of ground to Linux in the desktop arena, but according to the company, it has made strides in the realm of high performance computing. On Monday, Microsoft unveiled the first beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and released benchmarks showing performance parity with Linux in HPC systems. 
The news came at Supercomputing 09, the HPC industry's annual confab of engineers, scientists and academia in Portland, Oregon. "We're seeing performance numbers that rival Linux from micro-kernel benchmarks to ISV benchmarks," said Vince Mendillo, senior director of high performance computing at Microsoft.
Performance gains are credited in part to enhancements to Microsoft's implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) specification and to RDMA over Ethernet and InfiniBand, which permits nodes to access system memory of other nodes in the cluster without going through the operating system. The beta also reportedly includes optimizations for new processors and can deploy and manage up to 1,000 nodes.
Mendillo said that with these and other forthcoming releases--including a technology preview this week of Excel 2010 running on a cluster--Microsoft is putting supercomputing within reach of more enterprises. A major cog in that machine is Visual Studio 2010, set for release in March. "We've abstracted a lot of the capabilities of native and managed code so you can express parallelism with less lines of code," said Mendillo. "That's the first way to do it--if you're writing a new application. You can do it in fewer lines of code and not get yourself in trouble, because writing parallel code is very difficult."
For existing applications, he said VS2010 now includes help for MPI and porting. "We've had the MPI programming model for the last few iterations. If you have existing code, we provide a debugger and additional tools to help you debug your MPI code and port it over to Windows." Visual Studio 2010, now in beta 2, shares a download page with a more cluster-savvy .NET 4 Framework.
Comment by Wayne on November 19, 2009 2:28 PM
How much did Microsoft pay NetworkComputing for this uncritical rephrased press release? Had this been a story about Linux on the desktop (which has comparable market share to what Windows HPC has on super computers) you would have quoted half a dozen people claiming Linux on the desktop was a futile battle that should just be given up. Why is it so different when Microsoft is the underdog?
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Comment by Mike Fratto on November 19, 2009 2:59 PM
Why is any article that is not critical of Microsoft evicence of a pay-off. Seriously.
Can you point to a factual inaccuracy or a correction that needs to be made? If so, please share. I'm more than happy to have accurate stories in the site.
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Comment by Wayne on November 19, 2009 5:30 PM
How about a simply pointing the FACT that Microsoft has less than 1% of the market in the HPC sector and is, therefore, a niche player at best? Is that too much to ask? As written, this article makes it sound like there is a viable market for Windows in high performance computing, but there isn't. That is what makes the breathless tone of the article mystifying, which in turn is why I asked how much NC were paid to republish a Microsoft press release as "news". But by all means, call me a "zealot" or whatever your ad sales department tells you to call me.
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Comment by Whats wrong with this picture? on November 24, 2009 2:01 PM
Microsoft is the richest software company in the world. There boast is that they are as good as the people who do this on a volunteer basis. Microsoft should not have said a word until they were faster than Linux.
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