SGI and Microsoft Partner on Windows Supercomputer Clusters

Published: January 17, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hoping to jump-start its X64-based supercomputer cluster business, Silicon Graphics last week announced that it has partnered with Microsoft to support the software giant's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 operating system on its relatively new Altix XE servers.

SGI emerged from bankruptcy protection in October 2006 after several years of struggling to sell a Linux-Itanium supercomputer line exclusively. While technically elegant and offering very high scalability for certain classes of supercomputing workloads, the Itanium-based Altix 3000 and 4000 series supercomputers, which employ SGI's NUMAflex clustering architecture to build a shared global memory for nodes in a supercomputer cluster to share, were limited by the skepticism surrounding Itanium for many years. Which is why SGI decided in June of last year to start selling more traditional supercomputer clusters based on Intel's "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 series processors.

SGI supports Linux on the high-end Altix 4700 machines based on the Itanium processors, which span up to thousands of processors hooked into a global memory space, as well as on the new Altix XE Xeon clusters. While Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, Bill Gates, has been talking about Windows-based supercomputing for two years, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 did not come to market until June 2006, which was a year late and almost at the same exact time as SGI's Altix XE launch. When they were announced last summer, the Altix XE machines did not support Windows CCS. Starting in March of this year, they will.

As an old-time Unix workstation and then supercomputer vendor that had a failed run at a Windows workstation market, SGI and Microsoft might seem like odd bedfellows for a high performance computing partnership. According to Victor Varney, vice president of marketing and product management at SGI, plenty of its customers who use Linux clusters and Linux supers to run various supercomputer workloads have a whole class of technical users who work from Windows workstations and who have been largely shut out from the advances in the HPC market because the applications they run are only available on Linux or Unix and they only have Windows applications and Windows experience. "Now, we can provide cluster-class computing for these users," says Varney. "There is a large set of customers who have been left compute bound."

Microsoft wants to bring the same capabilities to these Windows users, of course. Windows CCS is about more than adding message passing interface code to Windows. "Microsoft's goal is to make compute cluster power as ubiquitous and as simple as print serving is as the departmental level of companies," explains Shawn Hansen, director of HPC marketing at Microsoft. The lack of Unix or Linux experience has been a barrier to entry into the HPC world for a lot of Windows users, and Microsoft wants to change that and SGI wants to ride up the wave by partnering with Microsoft. And Microsoft wants to partner with SGI because it knows how to walk the walk and talk the talk in the HPC market, and has deep experience in setting up supercomputer clusters at modest as well as large installations.

Windows CCS only runs on 64-bit Xeon and Opteron servers, not on the Itanium chips used in the midrange and high-end Altix 4700s. And neither Varney nor Hansen gave any indication that porting Windows CCS to the entry Altix 450 boxes was in the works--which would also make an interesting cluster--and they seemed surprised at even the thought of porting Windows CCS to the NUMAflex architecture for a virtualized MPI cluster inside a single Altix box. The Itanium version of Windows is not officially supported on the Altix line, but the two companies could, in theory, provide such capability. Microsoft was, after all, a very early partner with the former Sequent Computer Systems, which created a line of NUMA cluster servers that were intended for commercial applications. (Sequent was eaten by IBM years ago, and its technology has been used in many IBM server designs since then.)

Windows CCServer 2003 costs $469 per node and the MS-MPI protocol will support standard Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand, and any other network that provides a WinSock Direct-enabled driver. SGI is preconfiguring the software on its new Altix XE310 servers.

The Altix XE310 servers are based on the "Atoka" motherboard that Intel, SGI, motherboard and server supplier Supermicro, and interconnect supplier Mellanox worked together to create. The Atoka board is a half-width Xeon DP motherboard, which means two dual-socket servers can be put into the same 1U form factor that used to house only one server. The Altix XE310, which uses this motherboard, also uses the "Clovertown" Xeon 5300 quad-core processors from Intel, which means HPC customers can cram eight processor cores into a 1U chassis. When they ship in March, each Altix XE310 node will come with four Clovertown processors and Windows CCS--all for under $3,500.

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