I have spent this week at the International SuperComputing Show in Dresden - a great show with a really concentrated group of people from the industry.

I thought I would share a few of the significant press releases and announcements that have come out this year at ISC 07, some of my favorites include:

“I am pleased to see these new Top500 systems based on Windows Compute Cluster Server. The submissions underscore Microsoft’s profound interest in our community and prove that supercomputing can be done on Windows.”
Prof. Dr. Hans Werner Meuer,
Co-Founder of the Top500 list

Interesting write up here:

Microsoft Back on the Top 500 List of Biggest HPC Systems

and

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), a provider of software solutions, on Tuesday announced that it has extended its worldwide sales and marketing agreement with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to address the high-performance computing or HPC market.
The companies have planned to market high-performance computing into the mass market by delivering supercomputing clusters that are easier to deploy, support and manage for enterprise and mid-market customers.

Hewlett-Packard Extends Worldwide Sales And Marketing Agreement Microsoft

and this particular beauty...

Windows Server Woos Linux Customers - i had the pleasure of meeting Peter last year in Boston and it's nice to see our working relationship with him grow.

Enjoy!

Nice bit of fresh news and what great timing - just before ISC 07! Love it when this type of thing comes out!

This step-by-step guide is based on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) cluster that achieved 4.1 TFLOPS and can serve as a basis for setting up your large-scale compute cluster.

Deployment steps described in this white paper are based on the highly successful cluster deployment at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The cluster was built as a joint effort between NCSA and Microsoft, using commonly available hardware and Microsoft software. The cluster was composed of 450 x64 servers, achieving 4.1 teraflops (TFLOPs) on 896 processors using the widely accepted LINPACK benchmark.
The skill level that is required to complete the steps in this document assumes knowledge of how to install, configure, and manage Microsoft Windows Server 2003 in an Active Directory environment, and experience in adding and managing computers and users within a domain.

Enjoy!

Hmmm ever felt that someone is putting their heart and soul into something but don't quite see the big picture?

Made me smile, thanks to Jon at TBS for sending through!

Thought I would share my favourite books with you all:

1. Social Intelligence - Daniel Goleman
2. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
3. Fish! - Stephen C. Lundin
4. The Art of War - Sun Tzu
5. Good to Great - Jim Collins

All well worth a read and fantastic books!

Enjoy!

Hat tip to Steve for this great link to a whitepaper on CCS which sounds like it does just what it says on the tin and should help you out with those more prickly of problems you may encounter!

Step-by-Step Guide to Installing, Configuring, and Tuning a High-Performance Compute Cluster

Enjoy!