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Windows HPC Server released for parallel programming


By David Worthington
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September 22, 2008 —  The stock market may waver up and down, but Microsoft is riding high. Today, at the High Performance on Wall Street Conference in Manhattan, the company released Windows HPC Server 2008, a high-performance solution that introduces new capabilities for parallel programming and services-based integration.

HPC Server, which is based on Windows Server 2008, promises to help enterprises unify their Windows-based desktop and server workflows, and is positioned as a low-cost solution for high performance computing tasks.

As parallelism and performance go hand in hand, HPC Server 2008 integrates with Visual Studio 2008 to provide application developers with a parallel programming environment. Microsoft offers several interface options for HPC development.

Those include multiprocessor interconnect, a specification for a middleware interface for multiprocessor communication, as well as OpenMP, an API for shared-memory parallel programming in C/C++ and Fortran. Web services and other third-party compilers, debuggers and libraries that work with Visual Studio are also supported, according to Microsoft.

The release introduces a new “SOA” mode for to the server’s Job Scheduler that provides access to applications through the Windows Communication Foundation. The Job Scheduler is now integrated with the server’s Administration Console, and the command line interface now uses Windows PowerShell for all Job Scheduler functions, according to a Microsoft technical document.

“When Microsoft says they offer a SOA Job Scheduler, what they mean is that it supports a mode they call 'Service Oriented Architecture mode' that provides access to interactive applications through the Windows Communication Framework,” said Jason Bloomberg, a ZapThink analyst. “In other words, it provides services-based integration, but not SOA. This terminology is consistent for Microsoft, as they use the term 'SOA' to refer to services-based integration generally.”

When asked about how Microsoft defines SOA, Ryan Waite, product unit manager for HPC, said, "Developers leverage the Windows Communication Framework to SOA-enable their computational load. Windows HPC Server 2008 enables people to distribute these SOA applications across 10, 100 or 1,000 nodes."

Some of the server’s more generalized features are the ability to scale deployments from workstations to clusters, in addition to updated tools for the administration, deployment and management of the system that the company says will simplify those tasks. Microsoft has also worked to improve interoperability with non-Windows systems infrastructure.

Microsoft has made evaluation copies of HPC Server 2008 available for download on its website. Pricing is set at US$475 per node.

In a special incentive, Microsoft has partnered with Cray to promote the Cray CX1, a $25,000 compact supercomputer that runs Windows HPC Server.





Related Search Term(s): SOA & SaaS, Windows Server, Cray, Microsoft


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