HPC Server 2008 R2 Released

A new version of Microsoft’s high performance computing (HPC) platform, released in July 2010, adds several new features including the ability to use Windows 7 workstations as compute nodes, Excel features that allow users to more easily offload compute-intensive spreadsheet calculations to a cluster, and job scheduling and management improvements. The new version brings better access to HPC resources from the desktop and may encourage companies to investigate this previously niche product.

Adding Windows 7 Workstations to HPC

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, a special x64 edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 for HPC applications, runs applications on arrays of identical, commodity servers (called compute nodes in HPC implementations) working in parallel as a server cluster to solve compute-intensive problems under the control of a management server or head node.

The latest Windows HPC solution includes the ability to use Windows 7 PCs as workstation nodes. These nodes need not be dedicated to the HPC cluster and can be used for other tasks even while running HPC-assigned jobs. They can be scheduled to run cluster jobs according to a weekly availability policy (for example, every night on weekdays and all day on weekends), or they can be brought online manually. The feature will be attractive to companies that want to perform large-scale calculations by using workstation resources more effectively, particularly as more organizations are deploying desktops with 64-bit processors and 4GB or more of memory.