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Top500 and Windows-based HPC

By Shuo Li (Intel) (1 posts) on March 25, 2008 at 9:08 am

Almost two years after Microsoft entered into HPC market with its Windows Cluster Compute Server 2003, it is ready to announce a follow up product and rebrand it as Windows HPC Server 2008. In last week's Microsoft Financial Developer's conference, Microsoft further demonstrated how Windows-based HPC is a viable solution for performance demanding financial service industry. Almost 1/3 of the total presentations were directly or indirectly related to building Financial HPC applications on this new Windows platform. What's impressed me most is Microsoft's effort to get their Windows-based platform recognized in HPC industry organization such top500.org. In one of the presentation, the author demonstrated how to optimize an existing top500 entry to achieve 30% percent higher performance and ascend the ranking from position 106 to the equivalent of 75.

Hardware Configuration The Microsoft Rainier cluster is designed to be a scalable test bed built with Dell PowerEdge 1955 blade servers on 256 nodes and 2,048 cores running at 1.8Ghz. The connection is CISCO infiniband. Microsoft built it in early 2007 to test high-performance software products. The Rainier cluster is housed at a Microsoft data center in Tukwila, WA.

Linpack Benchmark The Top500 project tracks of high-performance computing (HPC) trends with one and only one benchmark: Linpack. Twice each year, the project assembles and releases a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, as measured by the Linpack benchmark. For the Rainier cluster, Microsoft used a Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 add-in to submit and track jobs.

Performance Ranking The Microsoft Rainier cluster achieved 8.997 TFLOPS and a ranking of 106 on the list. Using the same cluster hardware and pre-release Windows® HPC Server 2008, Rainier delivered a Linpack benchmark result of 11.75 teraflops (TFlops), performance comparable to that of clusters ranked at 75 on the Top500 List of June, 2007.

Optimization tricks Microsoft didn't give a complete breakdown of 30% performance improvement on different optimization and fine tuning tricks and tips. But what they did tell audience is that they have tried Intel Compiler 10.1 and Intel MKL library 10.0.

Conclusion Microsoft has brought high performance computing to Windows users community. With its unique strength in MS Office applications, high performance computing can be seemlessly integrated with rich client applications such as MS Excel. As of today March 15 2008, 6 of the top500 supercomputer deployments already adopted Windows HPC platforms. Intel's Compiler and MKL library, combined with Microsoft's Platform efficiency, can help improve the performance by as much as 30%, which represent a non-trivial ranking boost on your top500 list.

Categories: Financial Services Industry, Parallel Programming

Comments (2)

March 26, 2008 3:13 AM PDT UX-admin

"With its unique strength in MS Office applications, high performance computing can be seemlessly integrated with rich client applications such as MS Excel." But the age of fat-client run-on-the-metal applications is at a sunset. The writing is on the wall, AJAX has brought with it the needed interactivity and the web is already teeming with fat-client application equivalents. It might be a few years before desktop computing is abandoned, but I certainly don't see any more future in it. Besides, who writes desktop applications still? I'll tell you one thing from first hand experience: financial industry doesn't. Their apps, except for legacy stuff which is also getting the axe, are all running on the server, and the interface is the web browser. Apropos Windows cluster: it does not make sense to take something uncertain and something that costs money, when there is Solaris and Sun Cluster - a production grade operating environment and clustering software - open source, free, and gratis. Why would someone in their right mind take something that is uncertain and they have to pay for, when there is tried and tested production quality software out there available gratis? And for which one can easily and conveniently get one of the best support services in the industry?

March 30, 2008 9:17 AM PDT Shuo Li (Intel) Total Points: 252 Status Points: 202 Green Belt

To a large extent, I agree with you. But we also noticed that the age of monolithic server is near its end. A new clustered environment with virtualized data cache solution is rapid gaining its foothold. This benefit both thin client and fat client applications. I agree with you that Windows-based cluster solution is still in its adolescent years, but the potential is there. Windows based HPC server could further extend power of the vast amount of MS Office based rich client applications characterized by sophisticated Excel work sheet, at the same time, provide an enterprise-class application and data virtualization environment for the thin client.

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