SC 2010: WinHPC Server links to the Cloud & breaks Petaflop Barrier
Just sat through Ryan Waite’s talk at SC2010 showcasing some of the new features in WinHPC – being able to leverage Azure nodes directly from the WinHPC scheduler as well Windows 7 desktop machines (cycle stealing) – as well as being able to hit petaflop for perf. He also covered all the Excel Windows HPC integration which is really interesting for bringing HPC to the masses.
Windows HPC Server Extends to the Cloud and Breaks the Petaflop Barrier
At SC 2010 Microsoft also announced that by the end of the year it will release Service Pack 1 for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, allowing customers to connect their on-premises high-performance computing systems to Windows Azure. This capability provides customers with on-demand scale and capacity for high-performance computing applications, lowering IT costs and speeding discovery.
In addition, Microsoft announced that Windows HPC Server has surpassed a petaflop of performance, a degree of scale achieved by fewer than a dozen supercomputers worldwide. The Tokyo Institute of Technology has verified that its Tsubame 2.0 supercomputer running on Windows HPC Server has exceeded the ability to execute a quadrillion mathematical computations per second. The achievement demonstrates that Windows HPC Server can provide world-class high-performance computing on cost-effective software accessible to a wide range of organizations.
“We saw outstanding performance from Windows HPC Server during our Linpack benchmarking run on Tsubame 2.0,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Tech. “It broke the petaflop barrier and was on par with Linux at this scale. Moreover, in power-optimized configuration, it recorded over a gigaflop/watt — nearly three times more power efficient than an average laptop. We were very excited to see this level of performance, given Windows applications will be an important part of our work with our nearly 50 industry partners.”