With the release of Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 at Microsoft Tech•Ed 2006 earlier this month, Microsoft aims to make high-performance computing (HPC) cluster technology more mainstream by bringing the cost advantages, ease of use and partner ecosystem of the Microsoft Windows Server platform to commercial industry and the public sector. Through Microsoft’s collaboration with the HPC community and strategic partners, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is designed to deliver a more mainstream means for engineers, scientists and researchers to solve scaled-out business and scientific computational problems.

One such collaboration is with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 served as the underlying operating system for a new HPC cluster that recently achieved 4.1 trillion computations per second (teraflops) on 896, 64-bit Intel Xeon processors. This result, arrived at by using Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers, Cisco Topspin InfiniBand switches and Force10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) switches, was sufficient to place the system at 131st on the Top500 list. The cluster, named Lincoln, will serve strategic campus and state initiatives, with its peak performance approaching 6 teraflops.

PressPass spoke with Kyril Faenov, director of high-performance computing at Microsoft, and Rob Pennington, chief technology officer and leader of NCSA’s Innovative Systems Laboratory, to discuss the Top500 result, the new working relationship between Microsoft and NCSA and emerging trends in HPC.