Thursday, December 07, 2006

SAF06 - High Performance Computing

Ryan Waite, Group Program Manager for High Performance Computing

Background

  • 30 people in the group developing HPC
  • 10GFlops $30m 1991
  • 10GFlops $4000 2006
  • Departmental cluster growth higher than top end growth
  • Product development fundamental to Microsoft
    • Continued Office product development needs to demonstrate new functions and value
    • HPC seen as a possible avenue to do this in the future
  • Financial Services seen as a key sector

Usage

  • Weather Research and Forecast model
    • Community project
    • 3000 users
    • 360k lines only 750 changes to port to windows
  • Excel Services
    • Store spreadsheets on sharepoint
    • Run on the server
    • Run excel services on Compute Cluster
  • Monte Carlo
  • Risk
  • Speedo fabric design
    • Weave and affect on fluid dynamics
  • Procter and Gamble
    • Plastic bottle design
    • Packaging analysis
  • MRI scan of heart and blood flow
    • Fluid dynamics model
    • What if analysis of surgical changes

Compute Cluster Cost

  • Cheaper than standard windows 2003 (~30% less)
  • Can’t run office servers on it

Grid Computing

  • Definition not clear
  • Microsoft refer to
    • Compute grid
    • Data grid

Dataset Sizes are going to be MASSIVE

  • New Sky Telescope 2015
    • 80TB data in a scan on one night
    • Rescan next night
    • Identify what changes
    • Repeat!

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