Personal Supercomputing in FY08
Microsoft Fiscal Year 2008 (FY08) starts soon, on July 1st. In many ways FY08 will be very important for us. For the company, for the various product teams and for us as server evangelism team inside of the main Microsoft evangelism engine "Developer and Platform Evangelism" (D&PE). Windows Server 2008 aka. "Longhorn Server" will ship, Windows Server Virtualization will be available soon thereafter, Orcas is coming, some critical service packs will come our way to name just a few.
Another very exciting area is becoming more and more important and you will see quite some action - especially for developers - this year, High Performance Computing or HPC. In case you have not heard about Microsoft HPC solutions, check out the completely revamped product website.
My team is responsible for breadth technical evangelism for developer for Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS). The team here in Redmond, WA works with Microsoft evangelists worldwide on making sure the developer community has the necessary information, insight and tools to work on implementing solutions on CCS or porting existing solutions to CCS. Below a first glance at some of our plans for FY08. As timeline and dates become available I will share more details. The information provided below is meant to give you an idea about what's coming in FY08, some details still need to be defined and in some cases the necessary infrastructure is being built as I write this post.
Our work for the breadth ISV community complements the important job that is done by other teams inside Microsoft. For managed partners there are plenty of ways to learn more about CCS or to get help from Microsoft with your development and porting efforts. If you are a managed partner of Microsoft you either have heard about the programs or will soon get an FY08 update from your Microsoft contact!
Developer Training
A number of training labs for developers and IT Pros worldwide. These one to two day events have the goal to give the community a jump start in the Microsoft HPC equation CCE+CCP=CCS. These labs will teach the basics about HPC on Windows, migration and deployment. We are currently finalizing dates and locations for these labs and dates and agenda will be published soon.
Online Content
WindowsHPC.Net is a valuable well known online community resource for all things CCS. But there is always room for improvement. We will restructure this community website to make more information and resources about CCS even more accessible. Throughout the evangelism organization we make heavy use of Channel9. While today the HPC related content might be scarce, we have big plans for next year. And with the new and improved Channel9, currently in beta, things will get even more exciting.
Porting Labs
ISV partners in the final stages of an application port might need additional help and support to integrate their solution optimal into CCS. Porting support, Performance optimization on CCS and more will be available in special porting labs that will be offered in Redmond, WA. This is a highly resource intensive operation and only a few labs will be offered during the FY.
Online Infrastructure
We are working on setting up a set of HPC clusters in one of our data centers. The clusters will be available for remote access over the Internet. Developers can reserve compute clusters for testing and evaluation for limited times. The clusters can be accessed via Terminal Server and Remote Desktop. Once the infrastructure is in place, it will also be available for self paced training - if you cannot attend one of our life developer events in your region - and we plan to showcase ISV solutions on CCS.
That's it for now. More detailed information will be available soon via the usual channels like your Microsoft representative, MSDN, TechNet, windowshpc.net and newsletters and blogs.
If you are at SC'07 in Dresden next week and want to learn more about our evangelism efforts, find us. A great team of Microsoft HPC enthusiasts will be around at the event and at the Microsoft booth (C19-C22). You can always contact me to arrange s.th.