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Microsoft Edges Further into HPC
6/11/2008
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As Microsoft readies the release of its HPC Server 2008 for later this year, the company is showing signs of an increased presence in the high-performance computing market. Wednesday, Microsoft released details of nine HPC projects in higher education using its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, all of which launched within the last nine months.
HPC Server 2008 will be the successor to Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS 2003). Microsoft has said for some time that it will be released in the second half of 2008. We spoke with Microsoft yesterday about the schedule for its release, and a representative said it's still on target for this year, though an announcement for the specific release date is "still a few months out."
HPC Server 2008 went into its first round of beta testing in November. The second stage of the beta program launched just last month. Microsoft told us that it's seen a LINPACK performance increase of 30 percent in HPC Server 2008 (beta 1) compared with CCS 2003. Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's United States education general manager, said that further LINPACK trial results will be released later this month to coincide with the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
It's unknown exactly how many universities are participating in the HPC Server 2008 beta program, but Brian Hammond, Microsoft HPC specialist, said the figure is "in the hundreds."
Meanwhile, CCS 2003 has gained momentum in research institutions, a space that's dominated by Unix and Linux. Microsoft released details of nine projects in the United States that have been implemented over the last nine months or so, one as recently as two weeks ago. These include:
- University of Nebraska, Omaha's Holland Computing Center, which is using a 1,150-node cluster for medical, genetic, and other research projects;
- An NSF-funded project out of the
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