Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Windows Breaks Into Supercomputer Top 10

Posted by timothy on from the adversity-breeds-strength-in-redmond-too dept.

yanx0016 writes "Wow, that's some news this week at SuperComputing 08. Apparently Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, with a Chinese hardware OEM (Dawning), made #10 on the Top500 list, edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops. Folks were shocked to see Microsoft getting so serious around HPC; I think we are only beginning to see a glimpse of Microsoft in the HPC field."

3 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Retarded by Directrix1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Honestly, why would anyone want to roll-out something like this on Windows. A lot of extra expense for little practical value.

    --
    Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
  2. Potentially bogus by Greg+Lindahl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A couple of years ago I was surprised when one of my HPC customers issued a press release saying that their machine ran Windows HPC. The high-speed interconnect we'd sold them had no Windows drivers. You can guess what was going on: MicroSoft paid for the press release, and the machine actually ran Linux.

    Dawning's previous fast machine ran Linux.

  3. An attempt to artificially inflate my linux ego: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    #10 on the list uses a AMD x86_64 Opteron Quad Core @ 1900 MHz and has 30720 cores and pumps out 180600 GFlops.

    #8 on the list uses a AMD x86_64 Opteron Quad Core @ 2100 MHz and has 30976 cores and pumps out 205000 GFlops.

    #10 runs windows, #8 runs linux.

    Working through this: Gflops/# of cores/Mhz per core I get:

    #10 with 3.094 Gflops/Mhz and #8 with 3.151 Gflop/Mhz

    This leaves the linux machine getting 57 more KFlops per Mhz than the windows box.

    disclaimer: Totally useless mental farking, without knowing more about the systems other components and more about the processor generations it's silly to assume the 57 KFlops is purely due to the OS, but hey, it's windows and everyone loves an easy target. :D