Grid Meter » Digging Deeper on Microsoft's New Clustering Technology - Part 3 of 3

June 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Digging Deeper on Microsoft's New Clustering Technology - Part 3 of 3

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This is the final installment of Patrick O'Rourke, Lead Product Manager of the Windows Server Division's response to my questions about Microsoft's new clustering product announcement.

3) Grid Meter: [The announcement was] only about the infrastructure ... there is no talk about mainstream applications. For a company (Microsoft) that dominates the mainstream PC applications market you'd think they could have "Compute Cluster Server"- enabled one of them. It's disappointing to see a huge software player come out with a clustering technology without spelling out any sort of tie-in to their applications. Any details here?

O'Rourke: Our goal is to have the category leaders from the target verticals (oil & gas, financial services, engineering, life sciences) port their applications to Windows CCS. And as the June 9 news release shows, we're well on our way to accomplishing that by the end of 2006. This week at TechEd, we have The BioTeam, Ansys, Schlumberger, Parallel Geo, MATLAB and other apps in the booth. You can see more partners on the Windows CCS partner page. In fact, back in November at Supercomputing 2005, we had 20+ partners in our booth. You can read about some of them here.

At TechEd this week, we're also demonstrating the use of Excel client with Windows CCS. (Grid Meter Comment: hooray!) You can read about it in the TechEd keynote transcript. See the section where Kyril Faenov begins his demo. And you can watch the Webcast; Kyril's demo of Excel with Windows CCS is 60-70 minutes into the keynote. And look for more about this next week at the SIA Technology Conference in NYC.

And the folks at National Center for Atmospheric Research ported their well-known Weather Research and Forecasting Model to Windows CCS. WRF was originally developed for UNIX systems. 360,000 lines of code in C++, Fortran, OpenMP and MPI. What's interesting is that only 750 lines required modification to produce native Win64 binary that ran Windows CCS/MPI.

4) Grid Meter: Lastly, and this goes more toward confusion than disappointment, why is it called "Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003?" Was it three years late?

O'Rourke: You're not the only one to ask this. Windows CCS is based on Windows Server 2003 x64 edition , so that's why it has the 2003 designation. Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 consists of two separate products which can be purchased separately or together: a) Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, a 64-bit operating system for industry-standard x64 processors; b) Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack, which includes a Job Scheduler, message passing interface, cluster monitoring tools and deployment tools.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on June 15, 2006 06:53 AM

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