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

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.

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.