Windows HPC Server beta includes common productivity tools for desktops and clusters

The company has also launched the Parallel Computing Initiative, a programme aimed at creating a set of common development tools across multi-core desktops and clusters. Windows HPC Server 2008 will be the successor to Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, based on the Windows Server 2008 operating system and, says Microsoft, designed to increase productivity, scalability and manageability of its HPC systems. Key features, according to Kyril Faenov, general manager of HPC at Microsoft, are new high-speed networking, more efficient and scalable cluster management tools, advanced failover capabilities, a service oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler, and support for partners’ clustered file systems. “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, utilise and integrate the advanced HPC clusters within their environment,” says Faenov. “By upgrading to Windows HPC Server 2008 on our 2,048-core production test cluster, we increased the Linpack performance by 30% 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.” 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.