I’m looking forward to attending TechEd in Boston. There are some great breakout sessions planned on Windows infratsructure technologies. So over the course of the next week I’ll highlight some of them in case you haven’t decided which sessions to attend. Today’s post will focus on High Performance Computing.
But first, when I attended a session last week for TechEd speakers I was amazed to learn that 12,000 people are expected to attend the Boston show. And that there are TechEd shows in 22 cities around the world with an expected reach of 25,000 customers. So I hope you can attend a show in your area.
Back to HPC. Here we’re talking making massively-parallel computing accessible to Windows admins. It’s no longer the realm of just national computing centers. I’ve been fortunate enough in the past few weeks to speak to several early adopters of Windows Compute Cluster Server. Several customers have literally given the reviewers guide and CDs to their Windows system admins and within a few hours they’re installed and ready to schedule jobs. One thing they say is overlooked is that Windows CCS is not just an x64 operating system. The 2nd CD of Windows CCS (yes, there are 2 CDs if you get the physical media) contains a job scheduler, message passing interface, cluster monitoring tools and deployment tools. Add to that the OS integration to AD, MOM, use of RIS for unattended compute node installation and Visual Studio 2005 includes support for OpenMP standard and a parallel debugger for developing HPC apps.
I recently caught the following interview with Jay Boisseau, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), in an article in GridToday:
Anybody who thinks Microsoft’s entry into HPC is not potentially a great thing is crazy, but, of course, [Microsoft] should obtain guidance and feedback from our community – and they are, via these partnerships.