Microsoft Makes Supercomputing Mark

By Michelle Savage

July 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Microsoft may be a newcomer to the world of high-performance computing, but it’s already carving its mark. A beta version of its new Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008 scored 23rd place on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, which was released at the International Supercomputing Conference in June.

The new HPC Server 2008, which hit the first Release Candidate stage on June 30, boasts two microseconds of latency between nodes, using the new NetworkDirect interface and InfiniBand cards and switches. This performance boosted the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) supercomputer to its place on the TOP500.

The NCSA used the beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 to achieve 68.5 teraflops and 77.7 percent efficiency on 9,472 cores, making it the fastest Windows cluster to date.

Robert Pennington, deputy director of the NCSA, said the performance of this supercomputer exceeded the organization’s expectations for a machine of this class. “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,” he added.

Despite Microsoft’s entry into the top ranks of supercomputing, the company still has a long way to go to reach the coveted top 10 ranks. Linux HPC deployments outnumber Windows deployments 85 to 1. And while IBM POWER-based systems account for only 33 percent of the TOP500’s systems’ HPC capacity, compared to 62 percent for X64-based processors from Intel and AMD, POWER-based systems still dominate the list in terms of capacity.

But who knows if Microsoft is even shooting for first place? Research company IDC expects revenue for the total HPC server market to grow at an annual rate of 9.2 percent to reach US$18 billion by 2012. And Kyril Faenov, general manager of HPC at Microsoft, said that Microsoft’s strategy in HPC is to make this niche technology available only to a small segment of the computing market and make it accessible to a large numbers of users.

Related Search Term(s): Mainframe, Windows Server, IBM, Intel, Microsoft

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