Windows HPC Server 2008

Windows High Performance Computing Server 2008 has released to manufacturing. Ever wonder what goes into a product like this? How about a beta last November, then a series of CTPs, then a second Beta in May, and then a couple release candidates. Oh, and 600MB of technical specifications, 500K lines of code, 250 customer-based design changes, and 3000 beta downloads. Yeah, that's about it.

The HPC market is not the most inviting place for Windows people, as Ryan Waite, Product Unit Manager for Windows HPC Server, pointed out in his blog post about the release.

Yes, there are a lot of skeptics. The HPC industry uses mostly Linux or UNIX servers. To even suggest Windows could be successful in HPC is blasphemy. To build our second release we went to customers, especially customers who didn’t use Windows. We conducted over 100 customer visits. We did internships, where we would work on site with HPC admins and developers. We created a customer advisory board with leading HPC experts from computational finance, engineering, government, academia and the life sciences and they were brutally honest with their feedback. We assisted several ISVs with their ports to Windows and conducted five separate week-long performance deep-dives with ISVs where we not only helped port, analyze, and tune their codes but we helped with improving concurrency in general. In the process we ate a lot of humble pie while learning how people really use their HPC servers: job schedulers, deployment tools, cluster administration tools, compilers, debuggers, and MPI stacks.

You can find more information, and read about Cray becoming an OEM partner for Windows HPC at the new HPC site.