Did you know Windows HPC Server 2008 powered the 10th fasted computer on the planet in the Nov 2008 Top 500 Supercomputers? The cluster was a Dawning 5000A located at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and it clocked 180600 GFlops using 30720 cores!

 

However, even with this great scalability and ability to perform on the largest systems in the world; the focus of the HPC Server team is to build unprecedented ease of use and cluster management tools.

Windows HPC Server 2008 provides a productive, cost-effective, and high-performance computing (HPC) solution that runs on x64-bit hardware. Windows HPC Server 2008 can be deployed, managed, and extended using familiar tools and technologies.

Windows HPC Server 2008 enables broader adoption of HPC by providing a rich and integrated end-user experience scaling from the desktop application to the clusters. A wide range of software vendors, in various verticals, have designed their applications to work seamlessly with Windows HPC Server 2008 so that users can submit and monitor jobs from within familiar applications 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 2008 provides a comprehensive parallel programming environment for Windows HPC Server 2008. In addition to supporting OpenMP, MPI, and Web Services, Windows HPC Server 2008 also supports third-party numerical library providers, performance optimizers, compilers, and a native parallel debugger for developing and troubleshooting parallel programs.