Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Goes GA

Published: August 9, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft last week announced the general availability of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the version of Windows aimed at the high performance computing (HPC) segment of the market. Along with the GA announcement, the software maker shared the stories of several early Compute Cluster Server 2003 users, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Computational Biology Service Unit at Cornell University.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 has been a long time in coming for Microsoft, which is determined to capture its share of the low-end of the HPC market. The software maker foresees significant growth in the HPC market, including a whole slew of new applications that can take advantage of massive parallelization occurring across hundreds or thousands of cheap, powerful X64-based servers. With a "supercomputer on every desk," as the thinking goes, researchers will be better equipped to solve the more easily attainable answers, while sending the more difficult problems off to the super big supercomputer systems that have been the forte of IBM, SGI, NEC, and others.

In addition to announcing the general availability of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, Microsoft also shared several stories about how early adopters are using the product. One of the users is the Computational Biology Service Unit at Cornell University, which is using the HPC version of Windows to run massively parallel workloads such as sequence-based data mining, population genetics, and protein structure prediction.

"Upgrading to Windows Compute Cluster Server was a natural step for us," says Ron Elber, a professor at Cornell's computer science department, according to a PressPass Q&A published on Microsoft's Web site. The unit has been using a Windows-based HPC platform since the computational biology unit was started in 2001, and also uses Windows Server to run a SQL Server database and to server Web interfaces. "Therefore, Windows Compute Cluster Server allows for a homogeneous and easy-to-develop environment," especially compared to Linux, he says.

Another HPC customer expecting better manageability with Windows HPC is the Genome Research Institute at the University of Cincinnati, which expects Windows HPC to help with drug discovery. According to Matt Wortman, director of computational biology and IT for the institute, the familiarity of Windows, including the job scheduler and Active Directory, will make it easier to manage the institute's HPC assets.

"The setup and management of Windows Compute Cluster Server versus a Linux cluster is worlds apart for us," Wortman says. "The proof of this is the fact that a Windows technician with no HPC experience can set up a cluster from scratch in a matter of hours. Linux clusters simply take more care and feeding, and substantial knowledge of Linux."

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, is also supporting Windows Computer Cluster Server 2003. In the late 1990s, NCAR and its partners began working on a next-generation community weather model and data assimilation system, called the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF), says John Michalakes, NCAR's senior software engineer.

"We strive to maintain WRF on as many systems deployed in our user community as possible," Michalakes says. "Until now, that meant systems running some flavor of UNIX or Linux. With the emergence of Microsoft Windows as a viable HPC operating system, and given that we receive on average one user request per month asking if WRF will work on Windows, we see Windows CCS as an opportunity for further broadening the range of computational resources available to the WRF user community."

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is available at a starting price of $469 per node. The product, which relies on the MS-MPI protocol and supports standard Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand, and other WinSock Direct-enabled network architectures, supports only X64-based hardware from Intel and AMD. The product is shipped on a two-CD package. The first CD contains Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, and the second CD contains the Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack, a combination of interfaces, utilities, and management infrastructure that makes up Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

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