Fastest-Ever Windows HPC Cluster

An anonymous reader links to an eWeek story which says that Microsoft's "fastest-yet homegrown supercomputer, running the U.S. company's new Windows HPC Server 2008, debuted in the top 25 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers, as tested and operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. ... Most of the cores were made up of Intel Xeon quad-core chips. Storage for the system was about 6 terabytes," and asks "I wonder how the uptime compares? When machines scale to this size, they tend to quirk out in weird ways."

Comments

Define 'clustering'

[Junta]

Clustering in the sense I think you are discussing is the HA-clustering stuff. HPC clustering is a tad different.

Re:Questions

[afidel]

Yes, #23 a Dell cluster for NCSA. You can download the results in XLS format and then do a sort to quickly find data like that =)

Re:Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

The new version of Windows Cluster Compute Server can work more like a traditional supercomputer, with MPI, batch scheduling, etc. While I haven't seen or used it yet, I've heard Microsoft talking about it for a while now, telling everyone how they finally have the tools more traditional HPC systems have.

Re:Dear Microsoft

[kazoo boy]

Actually... When America tested it's first fighter jet it had a dummy propeller.

Re:Linux?

[Just some bastard]

But does it run linux?

It can but isn't, however this one does :)

Answers

[kiwimate]

I don't, but there's a lot of information at the home page. Including links to case studies for NASCAR, Daresbury, etc., etc.

Including FAQs. And, finally, the answer to the burning question: will it run Linux?

The application vendor is the best source for determining if your UNIX- or Linux-based application will run on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Note that Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack in CCS can take advantage of 32- and 64-bit versions of Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) on Windows Server 2003 Release 2 (R2), which may be required to run UNIX or Linux applications.

*yawns*

[painehope]

So what? Microsoft has been putting up huge booths at the annual Supercomputing Conference, even sponsored one, for years now. No one takes them seriously. They even bought a whole lab for some university that I'm too lazy to look up, and from what I heard, it was a complete flop (no pun intended, though that's probably all the performance you can expect on a real world application).

Supercomputing is the one area where Linux is the dominant operating system. Period. AIX still plays, but that's about it. Just check out top500.org if you don't believe me, the June list just came out. Though the IBM Blue Gene machines do run a proprietary microkernel on the individual computational nodes (the user-accessible nodes are Linux).

Re:Welcome Windows!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there are no CALs for this
http://www.microsoft.com/hpc/howtobuy/pricing/default.mspx

Re:I run several Windows Clusters

[Monoman]

I'm no MS fanboy but I think someone should make a few points.

"I run several Windows Clusters"
and I have a very hard time believing most of the claims of fact in this story.

I think you might be confusing Windows clustering with MS Compute Cluster (appears to be called HPC now). Windows clustering is used to provide fault tolerant applications where if one fails another node will fire up an instance to replace it. Compute Cluster is for spreading out computations across many active nodes. The HPC nodes do some calculations and return the results back. I guess like SETI.

Hmmm. And what installer was this? Is it available commercially? How much is the license for the version with this mythical four-hour installer?

I think the article said this was all done with HPC 2008 beta. You can find out pricing info here: http://www.microsoft.com/hpc/

"The performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 has yielded efficiencies that are among the highest we've seen for this class of machine," Pennington said.

What "class" would that be? I imagine it would explicitly exclude Free clusters.

PC class, not big iron or whatever you want to call those expensive IBM thingys.

One should question whether the efficacy of any institution/research project using their grant money wisely given the amount of money required to fulfill Microsoft's licensing requirements.

Furthermore, If research projects are actually considering wasting their grant dollars on Microsoft licenses, then the outlook for American R&D is grim.

In general I agree. However, I would be surprised if this cost them much at all besides time. They are probably a large enough customer that they get many MS products and services for free. In addition, the publicity for MS makes it worth it to MS to offer tons of incentives. I work at an EDU org and MS pricing is a lot less than retail ... a lot less.

Not "clustering"

[kiwimate]

A Windows MSCS cluster is essentially for fail-over/HA purposes. This is for high-performance purposes, and explictly excludes use as an application or database server. From the FAQs (although this is for 2003):

Windows Compute Cluster Server is licensed for use with HPC applications. HPC applications solve complex computational problems using several servers as a group, also called a cluster, to solve a single computational problem or a single set of closely related computational problems. Applications that run on a single server are not considered HPC applications. Applications that are distributed across multiple servers may not be considered HPC applications, unless they are working on a set of closely related computational problems.

You may not use Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE) as a general purpose server, database server, e-mail server, print server or file server. In order to allow Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 to be offered at a lower price, its server roles are restricted to computational use only. For example, if users want to install Microsoft SQL(TM) Server 2005 on a cluster node, they will need to purchase and install a full version of Windows Server 2003 64-bit Standard Edition or Windows Server 2003 64-bit Enterprise Edition on that cluster node. To maintain licensing compliance, Windows CCE takes advantage of a feature in Windows Server Standard to protect these applications from being executed. Please see the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Pricing and Licensing page for more information.

Re:Questions

[mozzis]

The GUI for submitting batch jobs is similar in concept to the print gui. It lists the cluster head nodes you are connected to and lets you pick one and set parameters such as number of nodes for your job, etc. There is also a monitor for jobs ongoing, similar in concept to the printer monitor.

Re:Only six teras ?

[cstdenis]

That is RAM not disk space.

Re:Okay...

[pontificator]

Tha majority are around the 1-4k mark, but in the top 25 the range is from 6720 cores to 212992 cores. Only 2 entries in the top 25 have fewer cores than Microsoft

http://www.top500.org/list/2008/06/100

Basically, it's all brute force if you want to get into the top 25.

Re:I think his point is

[pontificator]

Read the summary for TFA, it "debuted in the top 25". Look at the link I provided, it is #23.

Re:finally

[nmb3000]

I think the surprise here is that MS is using same core that's in their very shaky Vista software to run their server software.

I realize it's great fun to aimlessly bash Vista around here but I wasn't aware that the NT kernel was generally considered "shaky". In fact, I didn't even think that Vista was widely considered shaky. Bloated? Maybe. Resource intensive? Possibly. Some stupid UI decisions? Most certainly.

I'm (begrudgingly) running Vista at home (since I have to support it at work) and I haven't had any stability problems. I do curse the UI team for removing features I deem necessary and adding meaningless clutter, but I haven't seen any crashes or stability issues.