Windows HPC Server 2008 Shows Dew

"Microsoft impressed the supercomputing community last week when a beta of its new Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008 scored a top 25 ranking on the Top 490 list of world's biggest supercomputers." When such a report is made, there will always be a burst of excitement. Microsoft's HPC products have finally begun to show their strength in the market, and they have received more and more attention.

Before Microsoft introduced HPC products, the high-performance server field has always been the world of Linux and Unix. As a new entrant in the field of high-performance computing, the engineers of the Microsoft HPC R&D team can be described as Kailuan Lan, with Qi Shanlin. Everything has to start from scratch. Through continuous efforts, we launched Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 in 2006, which was initially confirmed. The version of Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta2, which was released in May this year, has attracted great attention from the industry; it was announced at TOP490.org in June. On the 31st Global Top 500 Supercomputers list, the server of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, USA, the performance of floating-point computing performance of 68.48TFlops was on the list of 23, and The operating system they use is Windows HPC Server 2008 Beta 1.

Now, Windows HPC Server 2008 can effectively manage thousands of compute nodes, with high-speed NetworkDirect RDMA technology, remote direct memory access interface, efficient cluster management tools, work scheduling for server architecture, HPCBP specification standard cluster Interconnection and so on; and compared with the previous version, the ease of use and stability of the 08 version of the product have been greatly improved. For example, we can deploy Windows HPC Server 2008 on hundreds of bare metal machines in a short period of time, and can run some diagnostic programs to easily test the connectivity of the machine. In addition, through the Heat Map, we can visually see the status of all nodes including the head node, including their CPU and memory usage, which have been well received by many partners. Pennington, the deputy director from NCSA, mentioned in the feedback: "When we deployed Windows on machines with more than a thousand nodes, we started from the time when these machines were bare metal, and it only took 4 when they started running the LINPACK test program. In an hour, the performance of WINDOWS HPC SERVER 2008 has reached one of the most efficient machines of its kind I have ever seen."

In addition to the improvement in performance, we also pay great attention to development partners and improve our products from the feedback of our partners. As far as China is concerned, we have already cooperated with Shanghai Supercomputer Center, Shuguang Information Industry Co., Ltd. We have established a close relationship and worked with our partners to promote the popularization and application of high-performance computing products in the Chinese market.

Behind the continuous success of our products, our Chinese R&D team is also indispensable. Interface management in Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 has been criticized by many people, but how to make our HPC Server 2008 have powerful and complex functions, while also having easy-to-use features is a very challenging task, which is directly When it comes to the user experience, if the user is stumped on the interface, the whole product is no longer comfortable. Through our unremitting efforts and continuous feedback from users, Windows HPC Server 2008 has made great improvements in the UI (user interface), including the management interface, configuration wizard, etc. have been greatly improved. For example, in the network topology selection section, we convert the abstract network topology into an intuitive network diagram (Figure 1), which is not easy to make mistakes, and is easy for users to understand and remember.

Figure 1: a schematic view of visual network

In addition, the aforementioned Windows HPC The Heat Map feature, which is popular among many customers in Server 2008, allows administrators to monitor the status of each node in real time. As shown in Figure 2, the administrator can see the available physical memory in all nodes. Disk Throughput and System Calls, and these indicators are graphically represented.

Figure 2: Heat Map

In addition, the powerful Reporting feature, also done by our Chinese R & D team: The administrator of the cluster can be a period of time on a cluster information on the collected and manifested in the form of icons, in order to facilitate the administrator of the state during that time cluster analysis in Figure 3 is the result of fine icon Reporting function generated:

3 :Reporting

The huge improvements in the UI have also received positive responses from many customers, Igor Kozin, a computer scientist from the Distributed Computing Group at Daresbury Laboratory in the UK. Say, "One of the highlights of Windows HPC Server 2008 is that it has a very reliable graphical user interface, and official Linux is still lacking in this area." With our UI interface, cluster administrators can quickly get started. The environment greatly reduces the time and effort spent on configuration.

In addition to the UI improvements, in order to meet the needs of different customers, we also support the use of the command line in PowerShell to complete the management and submission of the job. For administrators who are used to the C Shell and Korn Shell, using PowerShell scripts is quite convenient.

We have also added support for the SOA concept, providing APIs and even embedding Add-In in Visual Studio, making it easy for developers to use SOA to deploy parallel programs. Developers don't have to worry about which nodes their programs will run on. We provide the WCFBroker mechanism to automatically deploy programs to the appropriate nodes, simplifying developers writing parallel programs.

All in all, the features we mentioned are centered on providing value to our customers. The goal is to achieve a win-win situation for us and our customers, so we have received a lot of praise, and users’ opinions and even criticisms. Becoming the driving force for our continuous improvement of products, and expecting Windows HPC Server to achieve greater success!