‘Who Would Have Imagined,’ Part 2: Microsoft Supercomputing

At this week’s Supercomputing 2008 conference, Microsoft Corp. announced that it had debuted in the top 10 of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The mega-installation is at Shanghai Supercomputer Center and Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd., which ranked at No. 10 with 180.6 teraflops, the parallel computing speed, and 77.5 percent efficiency.

Microsoft points out that this is “a truly incredible achievement considering that 12 months ago in Reno, Nevada, Microsoft was at 116 on the Top500 list at Top500.org. This is on the heels of Windows HPC Server 2008 releasing to the manufacturing industry in September.”

Microsoft said it is bringing supercomputing to the masses. “Windows HPC Server 2008 makes supercomputing more accessible to end users by allowing them to harness computing power through a familiar Windows desktop environment,” the vendor said.

Microsoft also said it is offering kits on how to achieving supercomputing capacity on its Windows platform.

Microsoft and Cray Inc. — the grandfather of supercomputer vendors — teamed up in September with an announcement to drive high-productivity computing further into the mainstream with the Cray CX1 supercomputer.

Microsoft also said it is delivering developer tools for Windows-based supercomputing, including Task Parallel Library, Parallel LINQ and Coordination Data Structures for managed code to ease the transition to parallel code. These technologies, along with MPI, MPI.Net and Cluster-SOA, extend parallelism to clusters of thousands of nodes using Windows HPC Server 2008.