14 DAY TRIAL // A new major development milestone of the next iteration of Microsoft’s Windows for supercomputers is now available for download. Early adopters interested in test-driving the latest build of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 need to join the Beta program on Microsoft Connect. This is the second Beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, following the previous testing release, which was offered in November 2009. The Connect Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Beta will provide members with access to both builds and the documentation accompanying the platform designed for the high-performance computing market.
According to Ryan Waite, product unit manager, Microsoft High Performance Computing Group, Microsoft has focused on improving the scalability and performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 in Beta 2. In addition, work has been done to simplify parallelism, to integrate with Office Excel, and to boost interoperability.
“We’ve continued to improve scalability, regularly testing on the 1,000 node cluster in Microsoft Research—we plan to pursue Top500 runs that prove much greater scalability. We also know customers want to make use of spare processing cycles as part of their overall HPC infrastructures. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Beta 2 now integrates with workstations running Windows 7, enabling organizations to use them as cluster compute nodes,” Waite stated.
With the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010, scheduled for April 12, developers will get a key tool designed to help them build parallel applications for HPC. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 parallel development via the next-gen Visual Studio allowed devs to build, debug, and trace HPC applications, Waite noted. In this sense, the next version of Windows for supercomputers acts as a platform not only for traditional (batch-based) apps, but also for service-oriented (interactive) HPC applications.
“Whenever we speak with scientists, engineers, and analysts about their HPC needs we hear how they rely on Microsoft Excel for computations and how they’d love to scale those computations to run in parallel on a cluster. We’ve responded with HPC Services for Excel 2010. Top systems integrators and consultants like Wipro, Infusion and Grid Dynamics are now ready to help customers deploy and take advantage of HPC Services for Excel 2010,” Waite added.
The Linux and Windows interoperability efforts from Microsoft and partners such as Novell have evolved to the HPC market. In this regard, the Redmond company emphasizes that it has joined forces with companies such as Adaptive Computing, Clustercorp and Platform Computing in order to support customers running heterogeneous HPC environments, namely Windows HPC Server and Linux together.