Windows HPC Server Now in Top 10 Supercomputers

Windows HPC Server 2008 broke into the Top 10 among supercomputer list of the Top 500 super computers as judged by Top500.org

Windows HPC Server 2008, a 64-bit system that shipped Nov. 1, came in at No. 10, achieving 180.6 teraflops with 77.5% efficiency at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and Dawning Information Industry Co.

Windows HPC Server 2008 makes supercomputing more accessible to end users by allowing you to harness computing power through a familiar Windows desktop environment. It also reduces the complexity of Top500 runs and increases efficiency. The Top500 Excellence Kit includes a Top500 guide containing best practices and internal knowledge from Microsoft developers on how to achieve the highest-efficiency LINPACK runs. As a part of the kit, you can get several management and performance tools used in its 180.6-teraflop run, a High-Performance LINPACK (HPL) Wizard that automatically tunes HPL for your cluster environment. Get the code at Windows HPC Community Resources.

Parallelizing code is not easy given that programming languages, frameworks, developer tools, and even the majority of developers have grown up in a largely serial age. So the software development industry is taking strides to make parallelism more accessible to developers, and Microsoft is leading that charge. With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is delivering the first wave of powerful developer tools such as Task Parallel Library, Parallel LINQ and Coordination Data Structures for managed code to ease the transition to parallel code. These technologies, along with MPI, MPI.Net and Cluster-SOA, extend parallelism to clusters of thousands of nodes using Windows HPC Server 2008. More information on taking parallelism mainstream is available at Parallel Computing Development Center on MSDN.

ISVs are discovering the compute and cost advantage of Windows HPC Server. For more information, see Demos and Videos or try out the Trial Version.