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Microsoft Tests Speedy New HPC Server
By: Chris Preimesberger
2008-05-22
Article Rating:    / 37
There are 6 user comments on this IT Infrastructure story.
Now in beta trials, Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008 is benchmarked at a screaming 18 teraflops.
SANTA CLARA, Calif.A lot of people don't know this, but Microsoft, which
got rich producing PC operating systems and applications, has been
investing heavily in research and development in high-performance computing for
about the last eight years.
In fact, the world's largest software company currently employs hundreds of
engineers whose sole job it is to conceptualize and develop new products for
the burgeoning HPC market, which research
company IDC reports is the fast-growing
sector in IT at 19.5 percent per year.
Microsoft's No. 1 product in this arena is its Windows HPC
Server 2008, now in beta trials among selected customers. It is expected to be
finalized sometime in the summer of 2008, Microsoft General Manager of
Worldwide Partner Evangelism Eddie Amos told attendees here at the Platform
Global Conference held May 19 to 21 at the Hyatt Regency.
HPC Server 2008 will succeed the company's
first HPC server, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which was released in 2005
but didn't make a large dent in the market.
"We're working closely as a key partner with Platform Computing to come up
with excellent HPC products," Amos
said. "You'll see more along these lines later this year."
The new 2008 server runs on commodity hardware and is
30 percent more efficient in use of power than the 2003 edition, Amos said.
Platform Computing, a specialized HPC
management software producer that hosted the conference, gets along well with a
number of companies that are dyed-in-the-wool enemies in a lot of other sales
areas. The Canadian company has close partnerships with not only Microsoft, but
also IBM, Dell, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat and SAS
Institute.
Click here to read about why the field of high-performance computing is growing rapidly.
In Linpack standardized benchmark testing in Europe in
April, Microsoft reported that the HPC
Server 2008 delivered about 18 teraflops' I/O performancepretty
speedy in anybody's book.
That particular test had HPC Server 2008 running on 2,048 processors to deliver
over 75 percent of the theoretical peak performance for a single application, a
company spokesperson said.
"We employed the unmodified HPL code to solve a linear system with 681,984
unknowns in a little over 3 hours at an average speed of more than
18,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second," the spokesperson
said. "The program had a total memory footprint of almost 4TB.
"The cluster consisted of 256 compute nodes equipped with two new
quad-core Intel Xeon E5450 processors running at 3GHz clock speed each. All
nodes are connected with each other by a fast InfiniBand fabric with a 288-port
switch from Cisco Systems. The cluster nodes were built by Fujitsu Siemens,"
he said.
Amos said trials are ongoing in the HPC
Server 2008 group and that Microsoft will continue to ramp up its R&D in
the high-performance computing space.
| | Reader Comments: Microsoft Tests Speedy New HPC Server | | >>> Post your comment now!
| | AAA (acrimony and acronyms)Your long answer to a rhetorical 'question' (carefully marked with the absence of a question-mark) is acrimony.
Jake's dictum that an acronym should... Posted At: 06-02-08 By: Steve | | | | | | You are correctThis is Chris P, reporter on this story. Redundancies are not good in any kind of writing, and you are correct here. We have made the fix. Thanks... Posted At: 05-29-08 By: Chris Preimesberger | | | | | | Flops/secondNot to be too nit-picky, but "flops" already implies "operations per second" and adding another "per second" would mean you're measuring the rate of... Posted At: 05-29-08 By: Al H | | | | | | Speaking of grammar...Before you criticize someone's writing, perhaps you should perfect your own. Your first sentence is an interrogatory, but you failed to use the... Posted At: 05-29-08 By: Anonymous | | | | | | Do you mean HPC?Thanks for your note and for asking about my writing background. This is going to be more than you will want to know, but since you asked: I was... Posted At: 05-24-08 By: Chris Preimesberger | | | | | | | | | | | | >>> Post your comment now! | | | | | |
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