Installing Windows for Supercomputers

The next iteration of Windows for supercomputers is currently cooking in Redmond, and already available for testing by early adopters, in Beta stage. However, companies that need to deploy the high performance computing flavor of Windows into their production environments will need to turn to Windows HPC Server 2008. IT professionals that are new to Windows HPC Server can download free documentation offered by Microsoft to help them get started along. Windows HPC Server 2008 Getting Started Guide is up for grabs from the Microsoft Download Center free of charge.

“This guide provides basic conceptual information and general procedures for installing a high performance computing cluster using Windows HPC Server 2008. You can use this guide as a reference when you deploy and configure the head node in your HPC cluster, add compute nodes to the cluster, and verify that your cluster deployment has been successful,” reads the description from Microsoft.

In mid-November 2009, Microsoft made available for download the first Beta development milestone of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, the successor of the plain vanilla Windows HPC Server 2008. Testers continue to be able to access the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Beta bits via Microsoft Connect and get a feeling of what it brings to the table compared to its predecessor. According to the Redmond company, the second release (R2) of Windows HPC Server 2008 features improved scalability, new configuration and deployment options, improved system management, improved support for service-oriented architecture (SOA) workloads, Message Passing Interface (MPI) and networking enhancements, etc.

“You can configure your HPC cluster for high availability by installing the head node in the context of a failover cluster. If the server that is acting as the head node fails, the other server in the failover cluster automatically begins acting as the head node (through a process known as failover),” reads an excerpt from the Windows HPC Server 2008 Getting Started Guide.