Channel 9 Performance Talk Video
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In this video, two members of the Windows HPC Server 2008 product team discuss the TOP500List and Microsoft's entry to the list. The TOP500 project ranks and describes the 500 most powerful publicly-known computer systems in the world. Rankings are based on High-Performance LINPACK (HPL), a portable implementation of the LINPACK benchmark for distributed-memory computers.
At the June 2008 International Supercomputing Conference, Microsoft debuted in the top 25 of the list for the first time with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) cluster (named "Abe"), which ranked at number 23. The NCSA used the beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 to achieve its 68.5 teraflops and 77.7 percent efficiency on 9,472 cores (using a Dell PowerEdge 1955, 2.33 GHz, Infiniband SDR interconnect), making the Abe cluster one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world and the fastest Windows cluster to date. Previously, the cluster was running with Linux (on the same hardware configuration) to achieve 62.6 teraflops.
Next, the video shows the heat map during a LINPACK run on the Abe cluster. Waves of color visually indicate the amount of processing taking place on each node. The discussion then turns to the tuning process for the LINPACK benchmark, which is usually thought of as an art rather than a science. The video concludes with the discussion and demonstration of a new automated tuning tool designed to facilitate this process, the LINPACK Tuning Wizard, which automatically optimizes the LINPACK parameters for a given cluster.
