Microsoft HPC in the Top 500 - deployment whitepaper on the how!

Nice bit of fresh news and what great timing - just before ISC 07! Love it when this type of thing comes out!

This step-by-step guide is based on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) cluster that achieved 4.1 TFLOPS and can serve as a basis for setting up your large-scale compute cluster.

Deployment steps described in this white paper are based on the highly successful cluster deployment at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The cluster was built as a joint effort between NCSA and Microsoft, using commonly available hardware and Microsoft software. The cluster was composed of 450 x64 servers, achieving 4.1 teraflops (TFLOPs) on 896 processors using the widely accepted LINPACK benchmark.
The skill level that is required to complete the steps in this document assumes knowledge of how to install, configure, and manage Microsoft Windows Server 2003 in an Active Directory environment, and experience in adding and managing computers and users within a domain.

Enjoy!