Microsoft Windows HPC Beta On Par with Linux

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.Own A Cray For $40K
Microsoft's HPC ubiquity plan got help this week from Cray. The supercomputer maker unveiled the Cray CX1-iWS, an integrated workstation (that's the iWS part) that bundles Windows 7 at the front end, Windows HPC Server 2008 at the back and Intel Xeon processors inside.

What kinds of companies would use this kind of supercomputing power? "We're seeing applications we never thought of, starting from small architectural firms utilizing the technology to get a competitive advantage, to textile manufacturers to digital content creators who want deals in Asia and India doing visualization on green screen."  And for people who already have access to HPC systems, Mendillo said such systems can be a stop-gap. "You'd be surprised at the [number] of people who don't have access to the system because they can't get the time," he said. "If you're an engineer, scientist or financial [worker], how you make your simulations and models better is to iterate. And if you have to wait for your job submission on the cluster, it's a killer on productivity."

The Cray CX1-iWS is available now (exclusively through Dell), starting at $39,000 including Windows HPC Server 2008 release 1. Mendillo said that Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 is due for release in late summer; upgrading from R1 will be free to licensees.