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!