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Windows Breaks Into Supercomputer Top 10
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."
FLOPS and MIPS are all very well, but if the OS is pissing them away then it does not matter much.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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
...and I thought "hey, that's not news. I've known that for years!"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Arming the "Golden Shield" project with comprehensive IT technology
With the rapid development of the Internet, the public security information construction has become an important component of national information construction. Dawning made contributions in improving information technology level within all of the public security departments, arming the "Golden Shield" project with information technology, equipping the "police" force with digitalization, intensifying the police by technology and comprehensively raising China public security's law enforcement and administrative capacity.
I like how they quote "police" force.
So how many CALs are required to access the system?
And if I want to make the system available to a different researcher every 2 hours how much is it going to cost them to be license compliant?
How much cpu power am I going to need to compute the licensing costs?
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/lic_cal.mspx
That is, programmers who are familiar with Windows more than other systems.
And Microsoft is also looking to roll out a new language that is supposed to make parallel programming much easier for those programmers.
If it works, there would be a LOT more apps that take advantage of these systems.
Shortly after coming online, they noticed that it broke a speed record downloading "instructions" from abilena.podolsk-mo.ru
Then all you get is, "It looks like you're decoding the human genome. Would you like some help?"
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops
Emphasis mine.
Maybe I'm suffering from a case of advancing years, but I couldn't help but be amazed by this metric. These days it is indeed small, but another part of me remembers being a fifteen year old kid amazed at how absolutely great his C64 was.
I wonder exactly how many years a C64 would have to run to make up a single seconds worth of that difference. How long would a C64 have to run to perform 600 Gflop? How long would every single C64 ever made have to run? I wonder.
You'd have to run some integer-only 6502 IEEE floating point library or something like that to figure out how long a single floating point operation would take on the C64. Then multiply by 600G.
Would it be a few years? A few millenia? Blue-green algae?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
to run Windows 7.
Can you imagine a chair being thrown through the system administrator's window?
"With the release of HPC Server 2008 a few weeks ago, Microsoft also offered an academic version priced at $15 per node to generate interest. By comparison, a commercial license runs $450 per node"
and 500 screens showing "allow or deny?"
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
For once, a computer that deserves the "Vista capable" sticker.
Can you imagine a botnet of those?
I can.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
Software and hardware cost (seperated) per GFLOP please.
But does it run Linux?
A couple of years ago I was surprised when one of my HPC customers issued a press release saying that their machine ran Windows HPC. The high-speed interconnect we'd sold them had no Windows drivers. You can guess what was going on: MicroSoft paid for the press release, and the machine actually ran Linux.
Dawning's previous fast machine ran Linux.
I stopped reading your post when I got to "M$". I don't like the company and avoid their products as much as possible, but if you're going to wear your bias on your sleeve you probably don't have anything valuable to add to the discussion.
nobody in their right mind would let Windows in willingly.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"Erris" and "right handed" (who replied to you) are just two of twitter's 14 sockpuppet accounts.
See this thread for a recent fun shill session.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Well, the mods go either way, mostly. We're into deep offtopic territory here now. It really depends on whether or not people with mod points think that a) his drivel is valuable; and b) whether or not his shilling is "OK" because of (a).
Read this if you have time. It's linked from the journal that documents his gaming of the moderation system, but it captures the whole thing very well. That's who you're dealing with here, so I generally recommend just stepping away or risk getting some twitter on your shoes, which is generally not hygienic :)
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What's missing in the article is that there are only a few windows-based systems in the top500 and there numbers have been declining over the years.
New things are always on the horizon
So how many gigaflops does Norton Antivirus use on that puppy?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It is one thing to measure Drystones etc, or some other simple grunt-measuring metric, but that does not realistically stress the OS's influence on how the system will perform on huge complex number crunching models.
Microsoft has only been in this game for a short time and only recently got support for 256 cores. Getting support is one thing, getting **good**, optimised, support is quite another and that will take some time to get right.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Did they measure the performance with or without effect of antivirus software?
(parent comment unrelated)
Really, I thought windows was for dummies. (hint, everyone should agree and nod in confusion as to why there is a supercomputer running windows)
What is wrong with " M$ "?
Nothing is wrong with "M$", in the same sense that nothing is wrong with someone referring to Linux as "linsux" and open-source as "open-sores". The thing is, it tends to make you look somewhat immature.
If you can present a compelling coherent argument, you don't need to use lame decade old snipes about whatever subject matter you are discussing. If you use them in a compelling argument, it usually just makes the people you are out to persuade have a lesser opinion of what you wrote, and thus, you have sacrificed persuasive power.
It comes down to maturity for the most part and just simply putting forward a good argument.
#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
So why does anybody need a cluster of MS Windows servers to run MS Exchange so that people can merely read their email?
If MS can rake up a machine to hit Nr 10 in the performance stakes why can't it make a regular server that can cope with the BAU workloads of medium-sized businesses?
And even *that* computer doesn't run Vista...
(yeah, I know, but still)
I work for an engineering firm that is constantly running numerical analysis as part of our primary business. We run about 500 Linux boxes (with varying numbers of cores) arranged into multiple clusters. Our desktops run Windows.
Our pre-processing tools are Windows-based and our post-processing tools are Windows-based. Institutional knowledge/experience and mature tools means that this isn't going to change. Our in-house solvers are Linux-based not by choice, but because Microsoft doesn't offer a cost-effective solution for running our simulations on Windows boxes.
Even though we've developed utilities to make the process as smooth as possible, having Linux as part of the process chain is still an enormous pain and one we'd like to resolve. We've been watching Windows HPC with interest and can only hope for the price point to become reasonable.
Although Windows remains in poor regard with many here, there are many companies in the business of engineering simulation that would happily welcome Windows HPC.