At a key supercomputing conference on Monday, Microsoft released a test version of its Excel spreadsheet redesigned to run on powerful clusters of servers.
By engineering Excel to run better on such clusters Microsoft said that customers are seeing spreadsheets that normally would take weeks to calculate now run in a few hours.
The software maker also released a beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2--the latest version of Windows Server designed to run in high-performance compute clusters. The announcements were made at the SC09 conference in Portland, Ore.
Microsoft has taken the standard version of Excel 2010 and combined it with new Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 technology, allowing Excel to run on the cluster. The final version of Excel compute cluster and Win HPC Server 2008 R2 is expected to be ready in summer 2010. The capability has been in development for about 18 months.
The announcements are the latest in Microsoft's push over the last few years to better compete against Linux in the market for compute clusters--high-performance systems built by linking together large numbers of standard servers. Last year, for example, Microsoft managed to crack the upper echelons of the supercomputing ranks, landing in the top 25 rankings for the first time.
Microsoft also said the next version of its developer tools--Visual Studio 2010--will help ease the task of writing software that can run efficiently on such systems.
"Until now, the power of high-performance and parallel computing has largely been available to a limited subset of customers due to the complexity of environments and applications, as well as the challenges of parallel programming," Microsoft senior director Vince Mendillo said in a statement.
As for the new version of HPC Server, Microsoft said it offers the ability out-of-the-box to support clusters of up to 1,000 nodes as well as diskless boot and improved management and diagnostics abilities.
Microsoft's entry into the supercomputing market took another step Tuesday as high-end system leader Cray announced plans for its first machine running the Windows HPC Server operating system.
The Cray CX-1 supercomputer.
(Credit: Cray)Cray announced the CX1 supercomputer, which will run HPC Server 2008 and have list prices between $25,000 and $60,000--prices which make it the company's most affordable system ever.
"Cray sees Microsoft Windows becoming an increasingly important force in the HPC market," Cray Senior VP Ian Miller said in a statement. "With the Cray CX1 high productivity system and Windows HPC Server 2008, we're bringing the power of Cray supercomputing to a much wider range of new users with an affordable and adaptable system that provides incredible value and is easy to install, program and use with a broad array of applications from independent software vendors."
Cray billed the CX1 as an expansion of its lineup, aimed at universities, laboratories, and departments within big businesses. It said that the machine will be "the world's highest-performing computer that uses standard office power."
Although trying to offer Microsoft-based systems at the low end and proprietary systems at the high end may make sense for Cray, it's also an option that can be fraught with peril.
Consider the fate of SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics), which tried a similar approach with its Virtual Workstation product line.
For Microsoft, it is yet another step in the company's bid to be taken more seriously at the highest end of the computing market. Its current product, Windows HPC Server 2008, is the successor to the company's inaugural effort, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.
Updated 3:12 p.m. to correct the number of the highest ranking Windows cluster
While Windows is ubiquitous on the desktop and well represented in the server racks, until recently it has been nearly absent from the world's largest supercomputers.
Starting several years ago, though, Microsoft made a concerted effort at this part of the market, creating a separate version of Windows solely for computing clusters.
The first big fruits of that effort were evidenced in this year's top 500 list of the world's biggest supercomputers. Five of those on the list were Windows clusters, including one at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications that ranked No. 23.
Of course, that still leaves 495 that aren't running Windows at all.
But, it's significant progress, says Bill Hilf, who once set up Linux clusters for IBM but now oversees Windows Server marketing efforts. He says to expect further gains in the top 500 as Microsoft comes out with its next version of high-end Windows. That release, dubbed Windows HPC Server 2008 and now available in a feature-complete release candidate, is due for a final release this fall.
Hilf said it's this release that will really make Windows suitable for clusters with more than 1,000 separate servers. "We weren't ready to fully take on most of those," he said.
But although Top 500 results are nice, Hilf said perhaps more important is the potential for HPC Server 2008 to allow cluster computing to move further beyond government and university labs and into corporate departments where the massive computing power can be used for things like fraud detection.
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Microsoft's next version of high-end Windows, dubbed Windows HPC Server 2008, is available in a feature-complete release candidate and is due for a final release this fall.
(Credit: Microsoft )From a marketing perspective, multicore processors are an easy sell. Two brains are better than one. Four brains are better than two. You get the idea.
The challenge is that a whole lot of computer software has been designed to take advantage of ever-faster brains, not a computer packed full of them. It's a particular challenge for desktop and mobile computers. On the server and supercomputing side, the notion of parallel computing has been around for some time.
In the PC world, software makers have been scrambling to find new ways of thinking as Moore's law is quickly taking the chip world into a realm where there may be dozens or hundreds of processing units, or cores, on a single chip. In its latest attempt to figure out what to do with all those cores, Microsoft said Friday it is setting up a joint research center in Barcelona with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The BSC-Microsoft research center "will focus on the way microprocessors and software for the mobile and desktop market segments will be designed and interact over the next 10 years and beyond," Microsoft said in a statement. "The advent of many- and multi-core processor computing architectures will make it possible to deliver enormous computational power on a single chip, with profound implications for the way software is developed."
The center will look at new approaches to software design.
"To optimize the designs and interactions of multicore processors and software, we need to start from parallel programming," Barcelona Supercomputing Center director Mateo Valero said in a statement. "The way to deal with this multicore architecture challenge is to bring together computer architects and programming language experts."
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