Increase productivity and reduce complexity with an HPC solution

At the core of Dell's HPC solution is a modular HPC infrastructure stack built from industry-standard hardware components and best-of-breed partners products. The resulting solution delivers performance and scalability required by the most demanding applications at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems.

Below a definition of Windows stack and its key building blocks:

Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008
Microsoft®  Windows®  HPC Server 2008 is designed to provide a complete and integrated cluster environment including the operating system, a Job Scheduler, Message Passing Interface v2 (MPI2) support, and cluster management and monitoring components.

The software contains the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008, restricted to an HPC workload - and Microsoft HPC Pack 2008, which provides the additional interfaces, tools, and management infrastructure. The solution is also designed to integrate with other Microsoft products and offers the following integrated capabilities:

  • Systems Management
  • Job Scheduling
  • Networking and MPI
  • Storage
Additional features include:
  • Improved Productivity of Systems Administration and Cluster Interoperability. Windows HPC Server 2008 boost systems administrator's productivity by dramatically simplifying the overall deployment, administration, and management over the entire system lifetime while ensuring interoperability with existing systems infrastructure without the requiring specialized tools or training.
  • Rapid Development of HPC Applications. Windows HPC Server 2008 improves developer's productivity through the integration with Visual Studio 2008 which provides a comprehensive parallel programming environment for Windows HPC Server. In addition to supporting standard interfaces such as: OpenMP, MPI, and Web Services, Windows HPC Server also supports 3rd party numerical library providers, performance optimizers, compilers and debugging toolkits.
  • Seamlessly Scale from Workstation to Cluster. Windows HPC Server 2008 makes supercomputing more accessible to end users allowing them to seamlessly harness the power of distributed computing through a familiar Windows desktop environment without requiring specialized skills or training.