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Fastest-Ever Windows HPC Cluster
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jun 24, 2008 10:23 AM
from the class-envy dept.
from the class-envy dept.
An anonymous reader links to an eWeek story which says that Microsoft's "fastest-yet homegrown supercomputer, running the U.S. company's new Windows HPC Server 2008, debuted in the top 25 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers, as tested and operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. ... Most of the cores were made up of Intel Xeon quad-core chips. Storage for the system was about 6 terabytes," and asks "I wonder how the uptime compares? When machines scale to this size, they tend to quirk out in weird ways."
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Submission: Fastest-ever Windows HPC Cluster by Anonymous Coward
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finally (Score:5, Funny)
Enough power to run vista.
Re:finally (Score:4, Interesting)
You've no idea how right you are.
I got to test Server 2008 before it was released to the public. All our internal applications identified 2008 as "Vista".
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Re:finally (Score:5, Insightful)
I got to test Server 2008 before it was released to the public. All our internal applications identified 2008 as "Vista".
I have no idea why this is modded Informative.
Vista uses the NT kernel, version 6.0, build 6000. SP1 puts it up to 6001.
Server 2008 uses the NT kernel, version 6.0, build 6001.
Is it any surprise that software build prior to Server 2008 being released see it as Vista?
In related news, both Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 report being Linux v2.6.
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more similar (Score:5, Interesting)
Whereas Server 2008 and Vista share a tad more of their code base.
and *that* is relevant.
And could be humorously be alluded to because of the mis-detection of some software.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:finally (Score:4, Informative)
I think the surprise here is that MS is using same core that's in their very shaky Vista software to run their server software.
I realize it's great fun to aimlessly bash Vista around here but I wasn't aware that the NT kernel was generally considered "shaky". In fact, I didn't even think that Vista was widely considered shaky. Bloated? Maybe. Resource intensive? Possibly. Some stupid UI decisions? Most certainly.
I'm (begrudgingly) running Vista at home (since I have to support it at work) and I haven't had any stability problems. I do curse the UI team for removing features I deem necessary and adding meaningless clutter, but I haven't seen any crashes or stability issues.
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Re:finally (Score:5, Funny)
Enough power to run vista.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, this thing could ray trace Crysis.
Re:finally (Score:4, Funny)
mmm that may make a very nice addition to my botnet. Wonder what it has for network bandwidth?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:finally (Score:5, Funny)
"Windows has reported an error:
Cluster:fucked
Press any key on any terminal to reboot"
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Re:finally (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:finally (Score:5, Funny)
But you still have to turn off Aero.
Only because they cut some corners and went with integrated graphics on the motherboard.
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Re:finally (Score:4, Funny)
If one of these is expected to be networked in normal operation, perhaps it would be reasonable to require that antivirus software be running while doing benchmarks?
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Obvious Application Software (Score:3, Funny)
There's an obvious application [xkcd.com] to run on a Windows cluster.
Linux? (Score:4, Funny)
But does it run linux?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Every Tuesday... (Score:5, Funny)
"Your cluster has just finished downloading an update, would you like to reboot now?"
Clustered Windows Boxes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Define 'clustering' (Score:3, Informative)
Clustering in the sense I think you are discussing is the HA-clustering stuff. HPC clustering is a tad different.
Not "clustering" (Score:4, Informative)
A Windows MSCS cluster is essentially for fail-over/HA purposes. This is for high-performance purposes, and explictly excludes use as an application or database server. From the FAQs (although this is for 2003):
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One big difference... (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome Windows! (Score:5, Funny)
And with the easily affordable CALs, up to 11 users will be able to use it at the same time! (well 8, 2 CALs will prolly be used by junior admins, and one for "test")
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually there are no CALs for this
http://www.microsoft.com/hpc/howtobuy/pricing/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
Quirk Out? (Score:4, Funny)
BSOD (Score:3, Funny)
Only six teras ? (Score:3, Interesting)
So.... six terabytes... isn't that horribly small by today's standards ? I mean, our small backup server here is 2 teras, it's just a cheap PC with a bunch of SATA drives in it.
Does that mean my gaming rig and media server, when combined, constitute an "HPC Cluster" worthy of the top 100 ?
Ghey.
Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
Should be enough for everyone.
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New clippy quotes (Score:5, Funny)
"It looks like you're breaking into the top 25 fastest supercomputers. Would you like me to fix that?"
I run several Windows Clusters (Score:4, Insightful)
and I have a very hard time believing most of the claims of fact in this story.
"When we deployed Windows on our cluster, which has more than 1,000 nodes, we went from bare metal to running the Linpack benchmark programs in just four hours,"
Hmmm. And what installer was this? Is it available commercially? How much is the license for the version with this mythical four-hour installer?
"The performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 has yielded efficiencies that are among the highest we've seen for this class of machine," Pennington said.
What "class" would that be? I imagine it would explicitly exclude Free clusters.
One should question whether the efficacy of any institution/research project using their grant money wisely given the amount of money required to fulfill Microsoft's licensing requirements.
Furthermore, If research projects are actually considering wasting their grant dollars on Microsoft licenses, then the outlook for American R&D is grim.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which gives you NO FACTS about THEIR situation. The local janitor probably knows more about their install than you do.
Wrong. This article is an advertisement disguised as news.
DEFINITELY sounds like something from someone who "makes a decent salary running Windows clusters".
Might is a pretty big maybe.... I *know* a Linux-based cluster costs less. Especially as we get into 2008 pricing.
You have NO IDEA what they paid. You have NO IDEA
Re:I run several Windows Clusters (Score:5, Informative)
I'm no MS fanboy but I think someone should make a few points.
"I run several Windows Clusters"
and I have a very hard time believing most of the claims of fact in this story.
I think you might be confusing Windows clustering with MS Compute Cluster (appears to be called HPC now). Windows clustering is used to provide fault tolerant applications where if one fails another node will fire up an instance to replace it. Compute Cluster is for spreading out computations across many active nodes. The HPC nodes do some calculations and return the results back. I guess like SETI.
Hmmm. And what installer was this? Is it available commercially? How much is the license for the version with this mythical four-hour installer?
I think the article said this was all done with HPC 2008 beta. You can find out pricing info here: http://www.microsoft.com/hpc/ [microsoft.com]
"The performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 has yielded efficiencies that are among the highest we've seen for this class of machine," Pennington said.
What "class" would that be? I imagine it would explicitly exclude Free clusters.
PC class, not big iron or whatever you want to call those expensive IBM thingys.
One should question whether the efficacy of any institution/research project using their grant money wisely given the amount of money required to fulfill Microsoft's licensing requirements.
Furthermore, If research projects are actually considering wasting their grant dollars on Microsoft licenses, then the outlook for American R&D is grim.
In general I agree. However, I would be surprised if this cost them much at all besides time. They are probably a large enough customer that they get many MS products and services for free. In addition, the publicity for MS makes it worth it to MS to offer tons of incentives. I work at an EDU org and MS pricing is a lot less than retail ... a lot less.
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Re:I run several Windows Clusters (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I checked, the major alternative was free. The expensive part is finding someone who knows how to specify the hardware and set it up. That must be even harder for Windows, given the number of previous successful installs.
I'd love to know how they intend to license this - per node?
Okay... (Score:3, Interesting)
But the statistics for the top500.org show that over 9000 processors is way above normal for a supercomputer cluster up there. In fact less than 5% of machines in the entire 500 have more than 8000 processors, with the majority around the 1-4k mark. Oh, and 85% run Linux-only with an amazing 5 (not percent, actual projects) running Microsoft-only. So it looks like MS did this through hardware brute-force, not some amazing feat of programming. But then, that's true of them all. Although being in the top500 list is "good PR", it doesn't mean that much.
I wonder what the licensing is like for a 9000-processor Windows Server, though?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.top500.org/list/2008/06/100 [top500.org]
Basically, it's all brute force if you want to get into the top 25.
"Windows HPC Cluster" (Score:5, Funny)
What is the benefit of Windows on a cluster? (Score:3, Interesting)
Can someone explain why anyone could possibly want Windows on a scientific computing cluster? What does Windows offer that Linux doesn't?
Much of my work involves running molecular dynamics simulations. By HPC standards these are tiny calculations (in my case, usually 32 CPUs at a time). All science HPC software I'm aware of is Unix-oriented, and everything runs on Linux. At my institution we have an OS X cluster and we are in the process of purchasing a Linux cluster. We didn't even consider Windows - given the difficulties we've experienced administering Windows on the desktop, a Windows cluster just seems like an expensive exercise in frustration.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Before everyone completely dismisses this story... (Score:5, Interesting)
While I don't agree that Microsoft Windows HPC Server is the best software to manage a supercomputer, the linux diehards out there should pay attention to a problem that Microsoft is trying to tackle: accessible supercomputing. See one of their case studies [microsoft.com] as an example.
The bottom line is, these days pretty much anyone has access to a few TFlops of compute power, but the learning curve for getting something running on these machines is pretty intimidating, especially for non-CS based disciplines. I've had to take a 1-2 day class, plus futz around with the clunky command-line tools for a few days or so, on every supercomputer I've used, just to get simple jobs running. In my experience, people learn to game the various batching and queuing systems such that their jobs run faster than everyone else's, further shutting out the newcomers.
HPC vendors would be wise to focus more attention on the tools and interfaces so that Joe-researcher can set the number of nodes and go, rather than having to manually edit loadleveler text files, sending them to the queue, and then coming back next day to find the job failed due to a typo in the startup script.
On multi-TFLOP systems, not everyone needs 99.5% efficiency with all the implementation details that requires. These days, many people just want their job to run reasonably quickly, with no fuss.
The same thing happened several years ago with the move to high level languages like Python and Ruby. Sure, they're slower than C++ and FORTRAN. But for the vast majority of applications, you wouldn't know the difference on modern processors. And the turn around time and user-friendliness on these languages is so much better, using them is a no-brainer.
Hopefully Microsoft can spur the industry in this direction.
Re:Before everyone completely dismisses this story (Score:4, Interesting)
From your case study:
"""
In addition, it is investigating ways to allow users to connect remotely to the cluster. It expects to complete the project and move the cluster into production by March 2009.
"""
By time the cluster in the case study allows users to remotely log in, the hardware will have lost at least 1/2 of its value.
While more work is needed to make things user friendly, you have to remember that the funding is there for CPUs; not many folks are forward looking enough to realize researchers really need funding into making stuff easier.
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accessible supercomputing .. (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming MS was responding to this imagioned problem
"The contest showed that supercomputers
"but the learning curve for getting something running on these machines is pretty intimidating, especially for non-CS based disciplines. I've had to take a 1-2 day class, plus futz around"
You actually programed a supercomouter - cool. What type and where exactly? How does HPC Server differ in respect to other solutions?
"the Blue Gene family of supercomputers has been designed to deliver ultrascale performance within a standard programming environment [ibm.com]"
"Hopefully Microsoft can spur the industry in this direction"
You mean like continually inventing Apple, badly
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Re:accessible supercomputing .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Accessibility can mean: 1) able to access, 2) easy to use. When it comes to supercomputers, th former is very much true nowadays, but the latter is not. And it's not just a matter of programming. Pretty much all supercomputers can be programmed with a standard programming environment, say C + MPI + SCALAPACK libraries. (I think more could be done on that side too, but that is a different story).
But the steps required to actually run the programs can be exceedingly difficult. I liken it to the state of desktop linux about 12 years ago... Yes, it was accessible in that PCs were everywhere and you could grab a free copy of Slackware, but the setup process was mind numbing. Setting up X was not for the faint hearted as it required knowing intimate details about your graphics and display hardware. There were stern warnings that using the wrong modeline values could damage your CRT. Nowadays even my grandmother could install Ubuntu and everything would be automatically detected. That's the progress that I think needs to happen on the supercomputer user interface side of things.
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humph..... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's ok... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Answers (Score:4, Informative)
I don't, but there's a lot of information at the home page [microsoft.com]. Including links to case studies for NASCAR [microsoft.com], Daresbury [microsoft.com], etc., etc.
Including FAQs [microsoft.com]. And, finally, the answer to the burning question: will it run Linux?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's growing yes but its actually a very low margin market. The whole idea of an HPC cluster is saving money.
Somehow I doubt it's the margins so much as the fact that Linux dominates it and they are afraid Linux will use that to gain a foothold elsewhere.