MS HPC Server 2008 goes into beta

SOFTWARE STARTUP Microsoft has released the first public beta of Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, a server operating system for the high-performance computing (HPC) market. The company has also announced the Parallel Computing Initiative, a programme aimed at creating a set of common development tools across multi-core desktops and clusters.

HPC Server 2008 is based on Windows Server 2008 but with better scalability and manageability. It features new high-speed networking, cluster management tools, advanced failover capabilities, a service oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler, and support for partners' clustered file systems.

The beta is available for download here and the final version is scheduled for launch in the second half of 2008.

"Windows HPC Server 2008 allows customers to achieve the levels of scalability and performance of the most efficient clusters in the Top500 benchmark, while making it dramatically more productive to deploy, utilize and integrate the advanced HPC clusters within their environment," said Kyril Faenov, general manager of HPC at Microsoft.

"By upgrading to Windows HPC Server 2008 on our 2,048-core production test cluster, we increased the Linpack performance by 30 percent and were able to deploy and validate the cluster in less than two hours using out of the box software."

The OS is already being trialled at the Holland Computing Center in the Peter Kiewit Institute at the University of Nebraska, on a new 1,151-node Windows-based cluster used for a range of government, research and industry uses.

"We see this as a tremendous opportunity to advance the research capabilities of the Institute to meet the growing and emerging demands of the university community as well as our business partners," said John Callahan, director of technical infrastructure for the Peter Kiewit Institute.

"The scalability and demonstrated performance of the Windows platform has empowered us to provide a medium through which we can develop and train students in a new specialization on parallel computing."

The Parallel Computing Initiative adds extensions to the .NET Framework aimed at helping developers to improve the efficiency and scalability of parallel applications. Microsoft says it plans to ship previews of this technology within six months. µ

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