14 DAY TRIAL // HPC customers have recently received the second upgrade for the latest iteration of Windows for supercomputers, and as Microsoft tradition goes, additional resources are available for them on top of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2. On July 7th, 2011, the “Introducing Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP2” whitepaper went live on the Microsoft Download Center.
Available for download free of charge, the book is sponsored by the software giant and authored by David Chappell, Principal of DavidChappell & Associates, and is designed to provide insight into Windows HPC Server for those customers running parallel applications on clusters.
“To support Windows-based clusters, Microsoft provides Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. This technology offers a way to create and manage clusters built using Windows servers, Windows desktop workstations, and Windows Azure instances in the public cloud,” Chappell explains.
“The goal is to support high-performance computing (HPC), a category that includes a range of applications that can benefit from being distributed across a cluster. To allow this, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Service Pack (SP) 2 supports four major types of parallel applications.
“This paper provides an introduction to Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP2, including a look at the services it provides for creating and using clusters and an overview of how it supports each of the four application types.”
According to the whitepaper, the four flavors of parallel applications supported by Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP2 are: MPI apps, embarrassingly Parallel apps, Excel apps and Data-Intensive apps.
Customers interested in testing Microsoft’s operating system for the high performance computing market can download the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite with Service Pack 2 Evaluation trial release free of charge from the software giant.
“With today’s broader notion of cluster, which includes desktop workstations and cloud instances as well as traditional on-premises servers, adopting this technology has gotten easier. Organizations need no longer make a large up-front investment in servers just to get started with cluster computing,” Chappell added.
“Combined with the increasing breadth of applications supported on clusters—they’ve moved well beyond traditional HPC—this lower barrier to entry suggests an ever-broader role for this technology. Long relegated to a supporting role, cluster computing just might be headed for center stage.”
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 (SP2) RTM is available for download here.