RSS Feeds
High-Performance Computing Going Mainstream
Microsoft Windows could be the environment for many huge computing problems
Charles J. Murray, Senior Technical Editor -- Design News, October 23, 2006
High-performance computing — once the province of oil companies and defense think tanks — is moving down to join Outlook and PowerPoint on the Windows desktop. The move, resulting from a confluence of economic and technical forces, could bring extraordinary benefits to engineers designing products ranging from car bodies to electric motors to milling machines.
“From our perspective, it's a revolution,” notes Ray Browell, product manager for new technology at Anysys Inc., a maker of engineering simulation software. “There are many mid-size and small-size companies that need more compute power, but don't have the IT resources to make it happen. A lot of them have shied away from cluster computing because the barrier to entry was just too great up to now.”
Indeed, high-performance computing centers are reporting that mid-size manufacturers are joining traditional supercomputing customers in the use of Windows-based, high-performance efforts. The National High-Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart in Germany has worked with local companies on problems involving electromagnetic flows, combustion and computational fluid dynamics — all in Windows environments.
The trend is spilling over to the big manufacturers, as well. One German automaker is said to be looking at Windows-based systems to carry out virtual reality studies, while another is said to be considering it for crash testing. In the aerospace arena, Northrop Grumman has run satellite and space-based simulations on Windows and BAE Systems is now deploying a Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster to run various analysis problems on tanks, aircraft carriers and fighter jets. For rank-and-file engineers, this new trend represents another step up the price-performance ladder. For them, highly complex stress and thermal analysis solutions are now as close as their Windows-based PC network. Moreover, results from those advanced structural problems transfer easily into Word and PowerPoint documents, for sharing with colleagues.
“Industry is pushing towards the Windows environment,” says Uwe Wossner, who heads the Visualization Department at the National High Performance Computing Center at the University of Stuttgart. “Everyone has Windows on their laptops for presentations. And the people who run the IT infrastructures want a homogeneous operating system environment, so they want to use Windows, too.”
Disruptive Change
Oddly enough, the trend is being fueled by forces that have little to do with Windows or Microsoft, industry experts say. Since the early 1990s, when microprocessors began to replace 2 ft long, multi-layer processor boards in high-performance computers, costs have nosedived. Back then, a big supercomputer might run $25 million; today Cray Research sells some models for under $1 million. Moreover, the rapid evolution of microprocessors has made it possible for big workstations to compete in areas once owned by supercomputers. Couple those advances with the parallel evolution of operating systems and applications software, and the stage has been set for a grand entrance by Microsoft Corp., say experts.
“We don't know yet if this will be a disruptive change, but it's going to put a lot of pressure on the price-performance curve,” notes Marc Halpern, research director for Gartner Inc., an industry analyst. “It's big for the scientific community, but it has the potential to be huge for manufacturers.”
Microsoft Corp. foresaw the possibility several years ago, but bided its time before releasing Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (Windows CCS) software, which would enable users to network a group of Windows boxes. The key to its release, Microsoft executives say, was for a 64-bit edition of Windows to be created first. When that happened, Microsoft engineers developed the cluster software by building atop an industry standard known as MPICH, which enables networked machines to achieve parallelism. The resulting Windows product — competitively targeted at similar efforts in the Linux community — enabled Windows-based systems to chop a computing problem into segments and release it to desktop systems for solving. Owners of Windows-based networks immediately saw the wisdom in the system.
“Finite element analysis was so parallelizable that it was easy to see how multiple processors in a Windows environment could work on a problem across a network by borrowing resources from other machines,” Halpern recalls.
Indeed, makers of analysis and simulation software are joining the growing Windows effort. Ansys Inc. and Fluent Inc., for example, announced in September the upcoming release of multiphysics simulation software programs, Ansys 11.0 and Fluent 6.3, both of which will offer support for Windows CCS. Similarly, The MathWorks said in June its Distributed Computing Toolbox will support Windows CCS. Meanwhile, ESI Group has said that its crash simulation software, Pam-Crash Solver, will integrate Windows CCS capabilities. Such application software is expected to provide a key piece of the Windows-based high-performance computing puzzle.
Economies of Scale
With application software hitting the market now, Microsoft executives expect Windows CCS to begin gaining significant momentum. “The beauty of this Windows CCS architecture is that you can incorporate all your facility's Windows machines into this environment,” says Bill Gerould, director for high-tech and electronics at Microsoft. “You don't have to buy new processors or new desktop systems to make it work.”
To be sure, Microsoft executives aren't trying to replace high-performance computers in all situations. Many problems are simply too big and too complex to be run on Windows desktops, they say.
“We don't see our technology competing with a Cray Y-MP,” Gerould says. “You'll still see machines like those being used in big number-crunching activities.”
Still, industry insiders say that most of the key elements are in place for Microsoft to have some success in high-performance computing, particularly in manufacturing, as well as in low-end scientific problems.
“The one caveat is: What will the quality of the software be” notes Halpern of Gartner. “Microsoft doesn't have a reputation for top-quality software. So the question is, how real will this be in terms of being production-worthy”
In the end, though, Microsoft is expected to rely on economies of scale, which have ultimately given the company extraordinary success on the desktop. Because users can address massive computing problems with little or no hardware investment, and even less infrastructure cost, widespread interest is likely.
“It really comes down to a price-performance challenge,” Gerould concludes. “It's all about getting more and more performance for a lower and lower price.”
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Using Windows-based multiphysics software from Ansys, an areospace company solved a 100 million degree-of-freedom problem on a jet engine. 
| Useful Links | ||
| //Check out the links below for more info// | ||
| For more information on Microsoft's Windows CCS. | To learn more about the MathWorks Distributed Computing Toolbox. | |
Talkback
DN's Resource Center Get Free Information, Made Easy
-
Understanding a Modular Instrumentation System for Automated Test
National Instruments | White Paper
Request Item -
Advanced Features of High Speed Digital I/O devices : White Paper Series
National Instruments | White Paper
Request Item
