We’re DONE with HPC Server 2008! We shipped our first beta last November, then a series of CTPs, then a second Beta in May, then a couple release candidates, and now we are FINISHED. 600MB of technical specifications, 500K lines of code, 250 customer based design changes, and 3000 beta downloads.
2 years and 3 months ago we shipped Compute Cluster Server 2003 (yes, a strange name for a product that shipped in 2006). Now we’re shipping Windows HPC Server 2008. First, we have a better name. The Clunk-Clunk of Compute Cluster’s cacophony was confusing. The “HPC” means we’re ready for the most demanding HPC workloads. For example, on the last Top 500 list we were number TWENTY-THREE, jumping 93 positions from our previous listing of #116.
Yes, there are a lot of skeptics. The HPC industry uses mostly Linux or UNIX servers. To even suggest Windows could be successful in HPC is blasphemy. To build our second release we went to customers, especially customers who didn’t use Windows. We conducted over 100 customer visits. We did internships, where we would work on site with HPC admins and developers. We created a customer advisory board with leading HPC experts from computational finance, engineering, government, academia and the life sciences and they were brutally honest with their feedback. We assisted several ISVs with their ports to Windows and conducted five separate week-long performance deep-dives with ISVs where we not only helped port, analyze, and tune their codes but we helped with improving concurrency in general. In the process we ate a lot of humble pie while learning how people really use their HPC servers: job schedulers, deployment tools, cluster administration tools, compilers, debuggers, and MPI stacks.
What did we learn from all these meetings? First, the traditional HPC die-hards loved beating up on a Microsoft person for a while. After a while, when they learned that we were earnest, they opened up a little. We learned Windows must perform as well as Linux. There isn’t a single feature we could build that would convince people to switch to Windows if we didn’t have the perf. Second, once we meet Linux on perf then people want solutions that let them focus on their day job instead of learning to be an HPC administrator. Many users just want to use their application, like Matlab, Mathematica, Fluent, BLAST, Excel (yep), or favorite open source app and ignore the fact that there is a supercomputer behind their application making things faster. What a bummer we spent so much time making the job submission UI so pretty. Heh.
With HPC Server 2008 we achieved our performance goals and our customers and partners are responding. One ISV’s CEO got up at his user group meeting and announced that in 5 years most of his users would switch to Windows. All jokes about the Finance Industry aside, one of our beta customers is running their financial models on our beta software. At the International Supercomputing Conference Mellanox was doing live demos of HPC Server 2008 achieving 2µsec latency and 2GB/sec (gigaBYTE not gigabit) throughput on their new ConnectX Infiniband cards. At this speed, the entire contents of the US Library of Congress – some 29 million books and 101 million other sound recordings, videos, etc. - can be transmitted in 2.5 hours!
Finally, Cray became our newest OEM partner. Cray! The Supercomputer Company! Even the skeptics are taking notice of this announcement. All of our customer focus and performance work means we can create affordable, easy-to-use supercomputing solutions. This in turn means HPC can go further into the mainstream. Cray is a big believer in this model and the Cray CX1 fits under your desk. Woah! Now, instead of waiting for hours to run your job on the big supercomputer you can run your models on the supercomputer in your office, saving the big jobs for the big cluster and running your regular jobs immediately. Oh, and the hardware is beautiful. Check it out.
What’s next? We’re working hand in hand with our customer advisory board and TAP customers to design the next release of HPC Server. We’ll have more to report next year as we continue to focus on performance while making HPC part of mainstream computing.
Off to find champagne!
Ryan Waite
Product Unit Manager, Windows HPC Server
Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP) solution was cited as a leader (the top category) in a recent independent report, “The Forrester Wave: Network Access Control, Q3 2008.” Microsoft was one of the many network access control (NAC) vendors invited to participate in the report.
Forrester placed a lot of emphasis on different access control scenarios for the evaluation and the different vendors were evaluated around twelve different scenarios as well as strengths across technology, strategy and market presence.
“Microsoft has the strongest NAC product for managed endpoints,” the report stated. The report goes on to state that even though its official product has only been shipping since the inception of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has already established itself as a critical thought leader and contributor to the standardizations of NAC. “Microsoft has the overall highest score among the 12 scenarios we evaluated,” the report added.
Microsoft Network Access Protection ships with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista and XP SP3, and has a framework that provides interoperability with over 100 different vendors. The NAP statement of health (SOH) has also been adopted as a standard by the Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Network Connect (TNC).
More information about Microsoft NAP can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/nap
Amith Krishnan - senior product manager - Windows Server marketing
For the first time in the two companies history, Microsoft and Cray have teamed up to offer a powerful mix of what each company does best - - the Cray CX1! What is the CX1, you ask? It’s a compact supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008, that’s what. It’s the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered, with prices starting at $25,000. This exciting new product is available today and is being announced by Microsoft, Cray and a few others via live webcast at 8:00am, check it out!
It’s high performance and productivity computing that meets the needs of users, IT pros and developers by providing a highly integrated, familiar environment that is the right size and price for departmental and workgroup needs. The CX1 combines compute, storage, and visualization in a single integrated system that’s designed for non-traditional environments like labs, offices. If space is a problem, not to worry, it’s compact enough to fit in a broom closet.
How can you get one?! It’s as easy as shopping on Amazon.com. Customers can go online, order the CX1 system using a configurator and pay with credit card. If that’s not making supercomputing mainstream, I don’t know what is.
Tina Couch
Excerpt from the post on the EBS blog by general manager Eric Kidd:
I’d like to do two things right off the bat in this, my first, blog post here…
1) Announce that Windows Essential Business Server 2008 has reached RTM! (English now, more languages to come soon)
2) Extend my sincere gratitude to the many customers, MVPs, users, partners and enthusiasts that helped us build what we hope proves to be an exceptional product. Thank you.
The team (at Microsoft and extended by the community mentioned above) has been hard at work on this for a long time - Beta 1 shipped in December 2006 – and we’re now very close to general availability (GA) when we’ll have the privilege of hearing from customers what they like and what we can make better. The final step in release comes with our November 12 product launch (previously announced), which kicks-off GA. See Eric Watson’s earlier blog entry describing the difference between the RTM and GA milestones.
Read the rest here: http://blogs.technet.com/essentialbusinessserver/archive/2008/09/15/windows-essential-business-server-2008-rtm.aspx
Carlene Chmaj
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about IIS Extensions – new functionality for IIS that comes directly from the development team on a continuous basis. Well this week we have two more pre-release Extensions available, and each is a “Go Live” release candidate, meaning that they have reached the last milestone on the step to RTM, and are both therefore of sufficient quality to be used on production machines.
First up, we have now released a Go Live version of URL Rewriter, a rules-based engine that does exactly what it says on the tin – it allows you to rewrite your Web application URLs to be more user-friendly and search engine-friendly. Not only does this mean easier content handling, but you can also use the rewriting rules as a way to obfuscate your Web application information so as not to leave any hints for potential site hackers. Of course, security by obscurity should never be your only defense, but there’s no point in leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to your door if you don’t need to.
This is a pretty powerful module for IIS, and one that delivers oft-requested functionality similar to Apache’s mod_rewrite feature, plus much more besides. It has full regular expression pattern-matching and wildcard matching, global and local rules that can be applied server-wide or against a specific application directory, rewrite rules that can perform other actions such as sending an HTTP redirect or other status code, full access to server variables and HTTP headers, and it is completely integrated with other IIS features, meaning that you can use it with both kernel mode and user mode caching, troubleshoot rewriting errors through Failed Request Tracing, and configure the whole thing through a rich graphical user interface that is exposed through IIS Manager. Oh, and did I mention that you can import existing mod_rewrite rules directly to work with the IIS URL Rewriter?
Our second Extension update this week is a Release Candidate (a.k.a. “Go Live”) of Web Playlists, which allows media publishers and site managers to more directly control how media files are delivered to an end user, including limiting the ability to skip past or through specific playlist entries. Again, this module is integrated with IIS Manager, and the engine itself is implemented as a request handler for the IIS 7.0 integrated pipeline while the playlists themselves are stored in XML-based .isx files. In fact, with this release candidate, we have updated the XML format used to embrace the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) open standard.
The other main updates in this release are the ability to use client-side caching (previously disabled), and also to customize the output format by applying an XSLT stylesheet to the playlist. Once again, this release is ready for prime-time and is encouraged for use in production deployments. Are you already using an earlier release of URL Rewriter or Web Playlists, or will you be using these new release candidates? Let us know – we’d love to hear from you!
David Lowe.