HPQ: HP Adds Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 to High-performance Computing Portfolio

HP today announced the availability of new enhancements to its high-performance computing portfolio.

The HP Unified Cluster Portfolio now includes a certified original equipment manufacturer version of Microsoft Windows® Compute Cluster Server (CCS) 2003 and a new HP Cluster Management Utility option. Additionally available is HP Message Passing Interface on Windows CCS.

The enhancements are part of HP’s strategy to deliver industry-standard high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to customers. HP has led this market for the past three years; through the first half of 2006, HP held the No. 1 revenue share of 33 percent, according to research firm IDC.(1)

Availability of Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003

The certified OEM version of Windows CCS is fully integrated and supports HP ProLiant servers and HP BladeSystem solutions. It comes installed and tested on HP Cluster Platform and Cluster Platform Express configurations.

Windows CCS is designed specifically to make HPC clusters easier to deploy, manage and integrate with existing infrastructure and tools, allowing scientists and engineers to focus on science rather than IT. HP customers currently using Windows CCS include Queen’s University of Belfast, the Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute and Boeing.

“At the Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute, we have built a 16-node parallel computer using HP ProLiant DL145 servers running Windows Compute Cluster Server,” said Dr. Saifur Rahman, director, Virginia Technology Advanced Research Institute. “In a sample bioinformatics data processing application, we experienced a 15-to-1 improvement in processing time when compared to a single-node machine. The system was easy to install and is easy to use, giving our graduate students a taste of massively parallel processing computers in mainstream applications.”

HP enhancements to CCS include custom installation scripts and documentation that greatly streamline deployment. Optional HP Message Passing Interface and Voltaire InfiniBand drivers offer increased scalability and performance in applications that require high-speed, low-latency communications. Using HP’s custom installation kit for Windows CCS, a customer can realistically expect to have a 64-node cluster deployed and up and running within two hours.

Broad application support for Windows CCS includes major CAE applications, as well as key applications and tools for reservoir engineering, seismic data processing, workload scheduling and HPC software development. These applications are: gridMathematica 2.0 from Wolfram, LS-DYNA® from LSTC, STAR-CD from CD-adapco, ESI PAM-CRASH from ESI Group, Radioss from Mecalog, ABAQUS from ABAQUS, Inc., ANSYS 11 and FLUENT 6.3 from ANSYS, Inc., MD NASTRAN from MSC Software, I iNquiry from The BioTeam, LSF from Platform Computing, and MATLAB and the Distributing Computing tools from The MathWorks.

HP Message Passing Interface

HP Message Passing Interface (HP-MPI), a leading implementation of the Messaging Passing Interface standard and critical for running and porting parallel applications on clustered systems, enables rapid independent software vendor (ISV) application support for Windows CCS. More than 20 ISVs now support HP-MPI for Windows, HP-UX and Linux – more than any other commercial MPI implementation – and many ISVs are standardizing on HP-MPI due to its superior performance, switch independence, robust reliability and ease of use. A complete ISV applications list is available at www.hp.com/go/mpi.

HP-MPI supports multi-protocol execution of MPI applications on clusters and provides a transparent implementation supporting a broad range of switch interconnects and processor and operating system architectures. Application developers only need to build a single executable for each platform. These capabilities provide end users with greater performance, greater protection for their existing investments and lower total costs of ownership.

“HP-MPI is a key component of our customer focused solutions,” said Keith Glassford, vice president of the Materials Science division at San Diego-based Accelrys Software Inc. “It allows us to focus our energy and resources on doing what we’re good at, which is developing scientific and engineering software to solve customer problems. HP has become a conduit to bringing all the pieces for a clustering environment together. What they’re essentially building is an ecosystem made up of different vendor solutions that will ultimately drive high-performance cluster computing further into the mainstream.”

HP Cluster Management Utility

The HP Cluster Management Utility (CMU) is a low-cost, efficient and robust tool for the management of HPC clusters and compute farms. A simple graphic interface enables centralized console management, monitoring of cluster-wide and node-specific metrics, and software installation. CMU enables rapid provisioning and management of multiple images, making it ideal for a site with frequent changes to the software configuration across the cluster or on a subset of the cluster.

CMU is highly flexible and is being used to deploy a range of software environments, from simple compute farms to highly customized, application-specific configurations. CMU is available in Cluster Platform and Cluster Platform Express configurations for HP ProLiant and Integrity servers and HP BladeSystem, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell Suse Linux operating systems.



(1) IDC, “Worldwide Technical Server Qview Q2 2006,” August 2006.