supercomputing. simplified.

Transcription

1 supercomputing. simplified. INTRODUCING WINDOWS HPC SERVER 2008 R2 SUITE Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, Microsoft s third-generation HPC solution, provides a comprehensive and costeffective solution for harnessing the power of high performance computing. Out-of-the-box, world-class performance and scalability enables organizations of all sizes to rapidly deploy solutions ranging from personal HPC workstations to large clusters spanning thousands of nodes. Customers can lower both their operating and capital costs by (a) buying a complete, end-to-end solution that eliminates the time and effort required to cobble together a stack from disparate components, (b) taking advantage of existing technology investments and employee skills, (c) buying an affordably priced product and (d) using a rich, familiar, Windows Server-based administrative tool-set that enhances the productivity of system administrators. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 integrates easily with existing IT infrastructure to enable end users to access HPC resources using familiar Windows-based technologies. With a tightly integrated set of dedicated cluster and parallel development tools, anchored around Visual Studio 2010, developers can build robust and scalable HPC applications easily and quickly. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 is complemented by a rich ecosystem of SI, ISV and OEM partners to ensure that customers have access to the applications of their choice and the resources required to successfully run them. OVERVIEW SOLUTION Innovation is the key to success in today s competitive environment. To be innovative, many organizations from a variety of sectors, including energy, finance services, government, climate research and life sciences, are tackling inherently complex problems that require analyzing and processing huge amounts of data. Reaching solutions to these problems demands vast amounts of computing power and that s what Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 provides. Microsoft s high performance computing (HPC) solution is a fundamental enabler of innovation that provides dedicated compute resources to help customers solve complex simulations and models based on long-running calculations. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 provides a comprehensive set of deployment, administration, and monitoring tools that are easy to deploy, manage, and use with your existing infrastructure. SITUATION Customers require a cost effective and comprehensive HPC platform that is easy to deploy, manage, and use with existing infrastructure. Meeting these requirements allows customers to accomplish more in less time, and thereby improve the productivity of their system administrators, application developers, and end users. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 enables broader adoption of HPC by allowing end-users to experience HPC applications through familiar Windows technologies and tools. A wide range of industry-leading software vendors have designed their applications to work with Windows HPC Server so that users can submit and monitor jobs without having to learn new or complex user interfaces. Developing parallel programs requires integrated development environments along with support for distributed computing standards. Visual Studio 2010 provides a comprehensive parallel and cluster programming environment for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, including a native parallel debugger for developing and troubleshooting parallel development. In addition to supporting OpenMP, MPICH2, and Web Services, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 also supports

2 numerous third-party numerical library providers, performance optimizers, and compilers. ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 allows you to accomplish more, in less time and with reduced effort, by reusing users existing skills and integrating with the tools already in use in your enterprise. Administrators and developers can save time with a common productivity and development platform across technical workstations and clusters. Administrators can use existing Microsoft management tools to centrally manage their entire Windows Server infrastructure. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 fully supports command line interfaces for administrators, and it doesn t require end users to master command-line interfaces (CLIs) to harness the power of HPC. Application developers can work with familiar development tools, such as Visual Studio s native parallel debugger, to develop and troubleshoot parallel programs. Teams can manage their projects and collaborate using workflows by using Microsoft SharePoint Server SCALABLE PERFORMANCE Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 is built on proven Windows Server 2008 R2 x64- bit technology. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 can efficiently deploy and manage clusters of more than 1,000 Windows Servers. It includes scalable management tools that help systems administrators proactively monitor system health and maintain system stability. Interoperability with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides failover capabilities in the event of system failure. With Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, WCF Brokers also benefit from failover services. Persistent storage of requests and responses makes applications more resilient to network and hardware failures. leveraging the Windows Deployment Service (WDS) transport using the Windows Imaging Format (WIM) file and multiband multicast. A to do list shows the steps necessary to complete the configuration of a complete cluster. A new user interface and API is included for viewing and tracking the progress of deployments. A graphical wizard that s integrated into the Administration Console to build consistent compute node images that can be created, modified, and deployed across the cluster. Compute node images can be easily generated by injecting drivers, applications, or patches. The ability to boot nodes over the network using an iscsi connection to enable diskless compute nodes. The ability to dual boot compute nodes for dynamic switching of the operating system on the compute nodes so that both Windows and Linux applications can run on the same cluster at the same time (Figure 2). RAPID, SCALABLE DEPLOYMENT Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 includes wizards, tools, built-in management consoles, and a To Do List (Figure 1) to simplify the provisioning of compute nodes. Key capabilities include: Rapid deployment of compute nodes in parallel by Support for Workstation Nodes Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 supports the ability to run HPC compute jobs on Windows 7 workstations,

3 thereby extending the compute capacity of existing clusters without buying additional hardware. Administrators can control when what time of day and what days of the week the Windows 7 workstations become available for running compute jobs (Figure 3). Windows HPC Server ensures jobs are scheduled on workstations only when they are available to do so. communication and synchronization. Excel Workbooks and Excel User-defined functions (UDFs). 100s of commercial ISV packaged applications and open source codes optimized for Window HPC Server. Job Scheduler A multi-core job scheduler allows for scheduling by core, socket or server, and addresses a variety of application types. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 offers a range of scheduling policies: Preemption, Priority, Grow and Shrink, Backfill, Exclusive, and, new in R2, Service Balanced Scheduling. The Job Scheduler offers multiple interfaces for submitting jobs, including GUI, Command Line, Windows PowerShell 2.0, COM,.NET and Open Grid Forum s HPC Basic Profile Web Services Interface. Also included is support for prepare and release tasks that run before and after a job to prepare and cleanup nodes. A new user interface and API is available for viewing and reporting job progress (Figure 4). Security is maintained at all times. The workstation owners determine what privileges are available to the HPC jobs running on their workstations. Workstations can be managed as regular compute nodes using the HPC cluster manager, and monitored using the HPC Cluster Manager Heat map. PLATFORM FOR MULTIPLE APPLICATION TYPES The Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 includes runtimes, APIs, and a range of job scheduling policies that enable multiple types of HPC applications to be developed, deployed and managed through a single unified product. These include: MPI-based applications using Microsoft s own MS- MPI (or 3rd party MPI) libraries and runtimes as well as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based applications. Long running batch or low-latency interactive applications. Conveniently parallel applications as well as applications that require extensive inter-node MONITORING, ADMINISTRATION, DIAGNOSTICS AND REPORTING Built on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 includes scalable management, monitoring,

4 trouble shooting and reporting tools built using a familiar System Center interface. Management Clusters can be managed programmatically though command-line interfaces, PowerShell, or scripting languages such as PERL. It can also be managed graphically with the Administration console. Larger clusters can be partitioned into node groups for manageability and better matching of jobs to server types; changes to node groups immediately impact the jobs that are queued. Location-based node grouping allows administrators to view, categorize and batch operations on compute nodes based on their locations. routine, redundant tasks, and intelligent reporting and monitoring, are possible through the use of System Center Operations Manager An extensible reporting infrastructure lets administrators capture and report on custom error messages, status messages and usage data. The data is stored in a SQL Server database and can be viewed with SQL Server Reporting services or Excel. The latest release includes a richer reporting database and enhanced API for building custom reports (Figure 6). Monitoring The heat map (Figure 5) provides a real-time, at-aglance view of the entire cluster s status. The diagnostics and reporting infrastructure is integrated with the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure for easier trouble shooting. BUSINESS CRITICAL SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURES (SOA) APPLICATIONS Enhancements in the latest release include the ability to customize the heat map to monitor up to three nodelevel metrics as well the ability to color-code the metrics for easy visualization. A new user interface and API is provided to track progress of Jobs. Diagnostics and Reporting Built-in diagnostic tools allow administrators to quickly identify and diagnose hardware, software, or network problems across the cluster. The latest release includes an extensive diagnostic framework that allows the addition of custom developed diagnostic tests as well as the ability to change diagnostic parameters at runtime. Additional capabilities such as automating Windows HPC Server supports SOA-based applications built using Windows Communication foundation (WCF). The latest release includes enhancements for building business-critical SOA applications, such as: A new service-balanced job scheduling policy optimized for SOA and other dynamic workloads. A new fire-and-recollect programming model to implement re-attachable sessions by decoupling requests and responses as well as durable sessions, where the SOA runtime persist requests and their corresponding responses on behalf of clients so that requests do not have to be reissued even if clients or brokers fail. Finalization hooks enabling developers to add logic to perform cleanup before a service exits.

5 A cluster SOA debugger and cluster SOA profiler for building high performing, robust HPC SOA applications. An updated HPC Software Development Kit (SDK) with sample code that enables developers to more easily write Java-based client applications that communicate with.net services while benefiting from the same level of functionality provided with clients based on the.net Framework and WCF. MPI, NETWORKING AND HIGHSPEED INTERCONNECTS Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 significantly reduces the complexity of deploying multiple networks across a cluster by providing a networking wizard, diagnostics tools and a simplified way of performing network driver management. New functionality and enhancements include: called from spreadsheet cells like any standard Excel function. Excel 2010 extends this model to the HPC cluster by enabling UDFs to be calculated on an HPC cluster by one or more compute nodes, resulting in significantly better overall performance. Running Excel Workbooks on an HPC Cluster Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 supports running Excel 2010 instances on the compute nodes of an HPC cluster, so that multiple long-running and iterative workbooks can be calculated in parallel to perform better. Support for running Excel workbooks on a cluster also includes features designed to run without user interaction, providing a robust platform for calculating unattended Excel models. Support for new networking options including RDMA over Ethernet (iwarp) from Intel and RDMA over Infiniband quad data rate (40 Gbps) hardware. Optimization of shared memory implementations for new Intel Nehalem -based processors. MPI debugging capabilities through the integration of Visual Studio A pushbutton optimization wizard for High Performance LINPACK. ACCELERATING THE PERFORMANCE OF EXCEL 2010 Faster calculation times give business users and decision makers more information in less time, enabling more thorough analysis, faster access to important information, and better informed decisions. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 enables organizations to use HPC clusters to reduce calculation times for Excel workbooks by one or more orders of magnitude, with near linear scaling with additional cores. User-defined functions (UDFs) are a well-established mechanism for extending Excel, enabling functions that are contained in Excel extension libraries (XLLs) to be

6 WINDOWS HPC SERVER 2008 R2 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS The minimum system hardware requirements are similar to the hardware requirements for Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 supports up to 128 gigabytes (GB) of RAM. Supported processors include AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron, AMD Phenom, Intel Pentium with Intel EM64T, Intel Core 2 Duo with Intel EM64T, and Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T processors. CPU Requirement: x64 architecture computer with AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron, AMD Phenom, Intel Pentium with Intel EM64T, Intel Core 2 Duo with Intel EM64T, and Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T.processors Operating System Support: Minimum RAM: Maximum RAM: Minimum Disk Space for Setup: Disk Volumes: Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC Edition and Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition support up to four processors per server. Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition supports up to eight processors per server. 512 MB 128 GB 50 GB A single system volume is required for the head and compute nodes. Redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is supported but not required. The system volume must be MBR. Additional volumes can be MBR or GPT. Network Interface Cards: At least one network interface card (NIC) is required on the head node and each of the compute nodes. If a private network is used, the head node requires at least two NICs, and compute nodes require at least one NIC. Each node may also require a high-speed NIC for an application network. All nodes must have the same network hardware.