Microsoft Pitches Linux Cluster Buster

Microsoft today took the wraps off its new Windows Computer Cluster Server product, designed to drive high-end clustering out of research labs and into mainstream enterprises. (See MS Releases Server.)

The software is Microsoft's first foray into the high-performance computing (HPC) market. The aim? To lay a foundation for data-intensive applications running across clusters of server and storage hardware.

Cornell University is already using Microsoft's new product in its Computational Biology unit. Ron Elber, a professor in the University's department of computer science, told Byte and Switch that the software is currently scheduling and running around 20 bioinformatic applications on Dell clusters. "Microsoft is providing the underlying operating system," he says.

Although most of the early adopters cited by Microsoft, such as Cornell and Virginia Tech, are in the research sector, Elber predicts that enterprises will be next. "That's bound to change," he explains. "What Microsoft is trying to do is make the HPC cluster transparent to the end user, whether they are in industry or academia."

A key weapon in Microsoft's armory is that so many end-users are already conversant with the Windows operating system. "There's a lot of familiarity with the user interface," explains Patrick O'Rourke, Microsoft's lead product manager for the new cluster offering. "Our customers that have never tried high-performance computing can easily install this."Over at Cornell, Elber admits that he likes the ease of use offered by Cluster Server. "We have a nice graphical user interface that can support all the bioinformatic applications."

A number of software and hardware vendors have already committed to support the new software, including Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Myricom, Voltaire, and Platform Computing. (See Voltaire Unveils Solution.)

But Elber says there are still some hurdles for Cluster Server to overcome, most notably the fact that certain kinds of applications that run in HPC environments, like bioinformatic applications, are predominantly designed for Linux clusters.

Clusters and grids, nonetheless, are slowly snaking their way out of universities and shadowy government research labs into enterprise data centers. A recent Byte and Switch Insider reports that enterprise grids will receive increasing volumes of traffic in the next three to five years from applications built by companies such as Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Oracle. (See Insider Sees Data Center Crunch.)

As part of this push, Microsoft is also looking to exploit the ubiquity of Windows on high-end workstations, which are increasingly being used for HPC work. (See Daimler Maps Grid Savings.)"As [users] design, say, the wing of an airplane [on a desktop], they can easily roll that over to Windows Cluster Server," says Microsoft's O'Rourke. The cluster could do stress test analysis on the wing design and send the results back to the workstation.

O'Rourke argues that "it would take longer" and require a different set of skills to port applications from a Windows workstation to a Linux cluster, as opposed to the relatively straightforward migration from Windows workstation to Windows cluster.

Microsoft has also tied its Cluster Server product closely to the forthcoming release of Office Excel 12, which will be available later this year. The idea here is that users can take computational jobs that would previously have run on their laptops, such as Monte Carlo simulations used in the finance industry, and schedule them to run on the cluster.

By shifting the workload onto a cluster, says O'Rourke, Microsoft has already been able to slash the processing time for a mutual fund application from three minutes to 30 seconds. "We believe that Excel will be an important application to help bring HPC into the mainstream."

Pricing for Windows Computer Cluster Server 2003, which will be available in August, starts at $470 per node, although this price will vary depending on users' volume licenses.James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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