Windows CCS is Microsoft’s first product designed specifically to run parallel HPC applications, and has been previously known as Windows HPC Ediion and Windows Compute Cluster Edition.
According to Zane Adams, director of Windows server marketing, the product will be generally available for customers to buy in early August and will herald a new era of high performance computing.
Microsoft has been in the compute cluster business for a while. We’ve seen Windows Server used in supercomputing for years, but the market was still in its infancy, he said, adding that hardware commoditization and processor power increases made now the right time for Microsoft to enter the market.
I can now have a compute cluster sitting under my desk that 10 years ago would have needed a room, he added, noting that reduced space, power, and cooling requirements meant that the power of computing clusters could now be brought to a new user base.
Where there is a lot of experience of Windows and the management tools and security, we can bring the same platform, he said.
While Unix and Linux have a strong presence in the HPC space, Microsoft believes it can carve itself a share of the market thanks to the familiarity of its software, and the ease of integration with existing Windows desktop and server infrastructure.
Jamil Appa, a technology and engineering services group team leader with BAE systems, an early adopter customer for Windows CCS, added that this ease of use would enable its users to concentrate on what they are good at.
Engineering designers at the moment have to be very IT literate to drive the system. We want to see them as innovators, rather than IT drivers, he explained.
Microsoft chose the UK as the launch country for Windows CCS 2003 and had a number of early adopters available to explain why they have chosen to use Windows for HPC.
Among them were BAE and the University of Southampton, who have teamed up to deliver a proof-of-concept design system for to streamlining the aerodynamic simulation process based on Windows CCS at Southampton’s Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing.
It’s about empowering people to do what they’re meant to be doing, added Simon Cox, professor of computation methods at the University of Southampton, explaining that the integration with SQL Server, Visual Studio and Microsoft Workflow Foundation enabled users to be familiar with the tools they were using.
Another early adopter is Queen’s University in Belfast, which has based is assessment of a successful deployment on the fact that it has more people making more efficient use of its resources.
What we wanted to do was breed a new type of HOC user, said Professor Danny Crookes. They were happy to wait hours or days to run their programs. In fact, they were quite proud if they had to wait a week.
That has changed now that eight application have been migrated to the University’s Windows cluster, including financial modeling, computation fluid dynamics and image processing applications.
We’re not so much concerned with ringing 99.9% efficiency out of the system, we’re interested in bringing more people into HPC, he added. The comfort factor of Microsoft is a big influence in that.
Integration with existing Windows applications will be an advantage for Windows CCS, but the company is aware that it will have to integrate with Linux and Unix, and will do so via partnerships with the likes of Platform Computing Inc.
It is also aware that there are relatively few Windows applications that are capable of being deployed on a parallel cluster. For that the company has turned to the Microsoft Messaging Passing Interface, which is based on an unlikely source: the open source MPICH from Argonne National Labs.
We can extend an existing Linux compute cluster, said Adams. The [Platform] LSF job scheduler can enable the two clusters to operate as one. We are using MPI from Argonne Labs. We are actually using and distributing open source with this, he added.
