Slashdot Mirror
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."
Enough power to run vista.
But does it run linux?
"Your cluster has just finished downloading an update, would you like to reboot now?"
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
The Windows Server 2K8 code base must be better than previous versions of Windows. From what I understood, Windows didn't scale for clustering due to problems with file locking (IIRC, the overhead for tracking locks grew quickly enough that the performance was marginalized past about 4 nodes). Unless they're using an iSCSI SNS server that handles the locks over a clustered file system. Still, this is leaps and bounds beyond previous versions of Windows WRT clustering!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
So does everyone else.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
And with the easily affordable CALs, up to 11 users will be able to use it at the same time! (well 8, 2 CALs will prolly be used by junior admins, and one for "test")
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
"It looks like you're breaking into the top 25 fastest supercomputers. Would you like me to fix that?"
stuff |
and I have a very hard time believing most of the claims of fact in this story.
"When we deployed Windows on our cluster, which has more than 1,000 nodes, we went from bare metal to running the Linpack benchmark programs in just four hours,"
Hmmm. And what installer was this? Is it available commercially? How much is the license for the version with this mythical four-hour installer?
"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.
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Should be enough for everyone.
Is this euphemism for "botnet"?
While I don't agree that Microsoft Windows HPC Server is the best software to manage a supercomputer, the linux diehards out there should pay attention to a problem that Microsoft is trying to tackle: accessible supercomputing. See one of their case studies as an example.
The bottom line is, these days pretty much anyone has access to a few TFlops of compute power, but the learning curve for getting something running on these machines is pretty intimidating, especially for non-CS based disciplines. I've had to take a 1-2 day class, plus futz around with the clunky command-line tools for a few days or so, on every supercomputer I've used, just to get simple jobs running. In my experience, people learn to game the various batching and queuing systems such that their jobs run faster than everyone else's, further shutting out the newcomers.
HPC vendors would be wise to focus more attention on the tools and interfaces so that Joe-researcher can set the number of nodes and go, rather than having to manually edit loadleveler text files, sending them to the queue, and then coming back next day to find the job failed due to a typo in the startup script.
On multi-TFLOP systems, not everyone needs 99.5% efficiency with all the implementation details that requires. These days, many people just want their job to run reasonably quickly, with no fuss.
The same thing happened several years ago with the move to high level languages like Python and Ruby. Sure, they're slower than C++ and FORTRAN. But for the vast majority of applications, you wouldn't know the difference on modern processors. And the turn around time and user-friendliness on these languages is so much better, using them is a no-brainer.
Hopefully Microsoft can spur the industry in this direction.
Whereas Server 2008 and Vista share a tad more of their code base.
and *that* is relevant.
And could be humorously be alluded to because of the mis-detection of some software.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Accessibility can mean: 1) able to access, 2) easy to use. When it comes to supercomputers, th former is very much true nowadays, but the latter is not. And it's not just a matter of programming. Pretty much all supercomputers can be programmed with a standard programming environment, say C + MPI + SCALAPACK libraries. (I think more could be done on that side too, but that is a different story).
But the steps required to actually run the programs can be exceedingly difficult. I liken it to the state of desktop linux about 12 years ago... Yes, it was accessible in that PCs were everywhere and you could grab a free copy of Slackware, but the setup process was mind numbing. Setting up X was not for the faint hearted as it required knowing intimate details about your graphics and display hardware. There were stern warnings that using the wrong modeline values could damage your CRT. Nowadays even my grandmother could install Ubuntu and everything would be automatically detected. That's the progress that I think needs to happen on the supercomputer user interface side of things.