Software

Windows Clusters

Dell High-Performance Computing (HPC) Solutions Using Windows-Based Clusters

At the core of Dell's high-performance computing (HPC) solution is a modular HPC infrastructure stack built from industry-standard hardware components and best-of-breed products from partners. The resulting solution delivers performance and scalability required by the most demanding applications, at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems.

Below is a definition of Windows stack and its key building blocks:


Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008

Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008 is designed to provide a complete and integrated cluster environment, including:

  • The operating system
  • Job scheduler
  • Message Passing Interface v2 (MPI2) support
  • Cluster management and monitoring components

 

 

 

The software contains the 64-bit version of Windows Server® 2008 that is restricted to an HPC workload, and Microsoft HPC Pack 2008, which provides the additional interfaces, tools and management infrastructure. The solution is also designed to integrate with other Microsoft products, and offers the following integrated capabilities:

 

  • Systems management
  • Job scheduling
  • Networking and MPI
  • Storage

 

Additional features include:

 

  • Improved Productivity of Systems Administration and Cluster Interoperability — Windows HPC Server 2008 boosts the system administrator productivity by dramatically simplifying the overall deployment, administration and management over the entire system lifetime, while ensuring interoperability with existing systems infrastructure — without requiring specialized tools or training.
  • Rapid Development of HPC Applications — Windows HPC Server 2008 improves a developer's productivity through the integration with Visual Studio® 2008, which provides a comprehensive parallel programming environment for Windows HPC Server. In addition to supporting standard interfaces, such as OpenMP, MPI and Web Services, Windows HPC Server also supports third-party numerical library providers, performance optimizers, compilers and debugging toolkits.
  • Seamlessly Scale from Workstation to Cluster — Windows HPC Server 2008 makes supercomputing more accessible to end users by allowing them to seamlessly harness the power of distributed computing through a familiar Windows desktop environment, without requiring specialized skills or training.
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