Educational Brief

The Power of Simplicity:Insights to High Performance Computing

High Performance Computing (HPC) can yield new insights and opportunities for business, research, and government, but the high cost of supercomputers and the complexity of high performance clusters have been a barrier to many organizations. Now, the power and simplicity of Multi-Core Intel® Xeon® processors and Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) are putting these new insights within reach. This brief gives an overview of today’s high performance computing systems, their benefits, and some tips and resources for implementing HPC in your organization.

High Performance vs. Compute SpeedA higher processor speed can shorten the time to complete a single calculation. In contrast, HPC systems shorten the time to solution by dividing a problem among computing elements working in parallel. Not every problem can be divided this way. If every part of the calculation depends on the results of a previous part, the problem isn’t appropriate for HPC (think about calculating your taxes). However, if the program lends itself to parallelization, then the more processing elements you can use, the faster the solution. For example, if you’re using a computer to construct an image from satellite data, you could use 100 computing nodes, each calculating 1/100th of the image area, and you would have the image in (essentially) 1/100th of the time it would take with one computing node. (There is always some overhead for coordination among the processors, so you can never have a perfectly linear speed-up, just as “real-time” processing always involves some latency, however small.)

The amount of speed-up to be gained with HPC is limited by the number of calculations involved in the problem and by any parts of the problem that can’t be computed in parallel. Amdahl’s Law predicts the amount of speed-up possible by parallelizing any given problem.

Who Uses HPC?HPC is used for everything from real-time trading and financial analyses to manufacturing engineering, energy exploration, pharmaceuticals research, facial recognition applications for national security, and design and model-ing problems such as the forces on the surface of a space shuttle. Typical applications for HPC include:

• Recognition: the ability to recognize images and patterns such as a face in a photograph or a tumor in a diagnostic medical image

• Data mining: the ability to sift through large amounts of data to identify new patterns such as financial trends or unusual use of a credit card (which might indicate that the card has been stolen)

• Synthesis: the ability to process large data sets to create models of objects and interactions

Some organizations write their own HPC applications, but there are a number of commercial and scientific HPC applications already available for a variety of industries. For businesses, your financial, ERP, business intelligence, manufacturing systems or other enterprise software vendor may have HPC applications that could give your business competitive advantage, or an HPC system might boost the effectiveness of the applications you have.

advantage : simplicity

A practical definition of HPC

HPC involves using a collection of computing resources that cooperate to solve a

problem involving large amounts of data and calculations. The resources may be

multiple processing elements in a supercomputer, distributed processing nodes in a

peer-to-peer network or a cluster of connected, independent computers. The computing

elements may be “tightly coupled,” as in symmetric multi-processing, where computing

elements do synchronized work on a problem, or more “loosely coupled,” like the

computers in a cluster that work independently and synchronize only as required by the

computing problem (for example, to compile the sum of independent calculations).

HPC generally demands specialized program optimizations to get the most from a

system in terms of input/output, computation, and data movement. Some of these

optimizations are handled by the commercial, scientific or other HPC applications, and

some must be handled by the supercomputer operating system or the cluster server.

How Do We Build an HPC System?High performance computing tasks once required costly supercomputers, but most organizations today find it more cost-effective to address HPC needs with clusters of industry-standard computers. When choosing and/or designing an HPC system, the main things to consider are:

• Ease of use/costs of ownership• System performance and scalability • Designing the cluster to fit the application

Ease of Use/Costs of OwnershipDeploying and operating clusters for HPC has traditionally been a long and complex process, requiring an organization to stitch together and manage multiple pieces of hardware and software. Once deployed, clusters can be difficult to manage and support. Together, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and Multi-Core Intel Xeon processors such as the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® 5300 Series processor, with new Intel® Core™ microarchitecture, deliver outstanding performance and reliability while accelerating time-to-insight with an HPC platform that is simple to deploy, operate, and integrate with existing infrastructure and tools. Developers can leverage existing Windows skills plus Intel® software tools with built-in CCS support, and system designers and managers can reduce complexity by using the world’s most widely deployed server platforms.

Developers and system designers know that the power of multi-processor and clustered architectures is only as good as your ability to harness it. Intel® Visual Fortran and Intel® Visual C++ Compilers for Windows provide automatic optimization and parallelization that enables applications to quickly and easily achieve performance gains from CCS clustering on Intel® multi-core architectures, and the Intel® Math Kernel Library provides highly optimized, thread-safe functions for a wide range of HPC applications.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 provides a supe-rior out-of-the-box deployment experience, an integrated software stack to simplify setup, and support from leading HPC applications in a wide range of industries. And with breakthrough performance, energy efficiency, and stability and reliability, new Multi-Core Intel Xeon processor-based server systems provide an exceptional foundation for high performance computing with Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

System Performance and ScalabilityOne of the rules of HPC systems is that there will be growth and upgrades. So you need to consider system performance and the effort involved in adding new computing resources to a cluster, and you need to consider the space, power requirements and costs as your systems grow.

advantage : simplicity advantage : power

On the software side, your HPC solution should allow you to add new computing resources without disruption. For example, the Remote Installation Services (RIS) feature of Windows Compute Cluster Server makes adding a compute node as simple as plugging it into the network and turning it on. The CCS software automatically discovers the resources of that node and redistributes computing work to take advantage of it.

On the hardware side, choose an HPC platform that gives maximum performance and allows you to minimize space and power requirements. This is a serious consideration; traditional large supercomputing installations can take whole buildings, with up to half the space dedicated to air condi-tioning alone. With up to 4x the performance of competing processors on industry benchmarks1, and up to 50% perfor-mance improvement over the previous generation dual-core processor in the same power envelope2, the Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 Series processor delivers an efficient and power-ful server foundation for CCS-based HPC applications.

Cluster DesignAs mentioned earlier, the amount of parallelism (hence, speed-up) that can be achieved through HPC depends on the nature of the computing problem. If you are using a commercially available HPC application such as business intelligence software, your software vendor can help you design an HPC cluster system based on your data volumes, business requirements, etc. If you are running your own HPC software, learn about Amdahl’s Law and talk to in-house experts to make some working assumptions about how many processing nodes might be applied, then consider your bud-get and business requirements. If you have chosen your HPC system for scalability and ease of use, you can start with a smaller number of nodes to test and fine-tune your applica-tion, and then add more nodes to increase speed or handle growth in data volume or usage.

Getting StartedHigh performance computing applications can offer invaluable insights into research, design and business questions. Together, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and Multi-Core Intel Xeon processor-based server systems help make finding the answers faster, simpler, and more affordable.

Your system vendor or business software vendor can help you get started with HPC solutions. With industry leaders Microsoft and Intel, you can choose solutions from a vast ecosystem of vendors worldwide, and Microsoft and Intel®-based solutions include advanced system management fea-tures that make them affordable to own and operate. Intel® Solution Services is Intel Corporation’s worldwide profes-sional services organization that helps companies capitalize on the full value of Intel® architecture through consulting focused on architecture transitions. Through Intel Solution Services, your development team gains expertise in Intel® architecture and next-generation technologies to design cost-effective solutions that help deliver superior business results.

Microsoft Services is the consulting, technical support, and customer service arm of the world’s leading software company. The organization helps customers and partners discover and implement high value Microsoft solutions that generate rapid, meaningful, and measurable results. With its global partner network and support infrastructure, Microsoft Services enables the successful adoption, deployment, and use of Microsoft solutions and technologies for all customers, from the individual to the enterprise.

For more information about Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, visit www.microsoft.com/hpc. For information about purchasing Compute Cluster Server, e-mail us at hpcinfo@microsoft.com. To find Microsoft offices worldwide, visit www.microsoft.com/worldwide.

Accelerate your transition to Intel multi-core processing. Talk with your local Intel representative, and visit us on the Web at www.intel.com/xeon. And for more information about Intel platforms in high performance computing, go to www.intel.com/business/ittopics/hpc.

For additional information on Intel Solution Services, download a brochure or contact us at www.intel.com/go/ intelsolutionservices.

For information about Microsoft Services, visit www.microsoft.com/services/microsoftservices/srv_about.mspx.

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www.intel.com

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1 Quad-Core Xeon X5355 – Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor X5355 (“Clovertown 2.66 GHz”) vs. Dual-Core Opteron 285 – Dual-Core AMD Opteron* Model 285 (“2.60 GHz”) on HPC-centric Linpack* benchmark. Ac-tual results may vary. For more information on performance tests and on the performance of Intel products, visit http://www.intel.com/performance/resources/limits.htm or call (U.S.) 1-800-628-8686 or 1-916-356-3104.

2 SPECint_rate_base2000* Compares Xeon E5345 (CTN 2.33/1333/80W) with Xeon 5160 (WC 3.00/1333/80W

Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systems and/or components and reflect the approximate performance of Intel products as measured by those tests. Any difference in system hard-ware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance. Buyers should consult other sources of information to evaluate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing. For more information on performance tests and on the performance of Intel products, visit http://www.intel.com/performance/resources/limits.htm or call (U.S.) 1-800-628-8686 or 1-916-356-3104.

Copyright © 2007 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399 U.S.A. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2007 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Core, and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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