Enabling high performance computing using Microsoft HPC server
Sridutt Bhalachandra, Sripriya Thothadri, P Goutam Prasad Rao · 2012
With processor speeds stagnating, most organizations are investing in multi-cores processors and clusters, in order to scale out to meet the growing computing and data demands. Traditional applications are unable to utilize the full power of this infrastructure due to their sequential design and organizations are compelled to add more and more computing infrastructure to scale out the applications. The multiplying infrastructure comes with a heavy price tag and rising space, power and infrastructure management costs. This white paper demonstrates an approach using Microsoft High Performance Computing (HPC) Server to transparently help applications utilize the full capacity of its hardware resources. The main focus of this approach is to accelerate application throughput by enabling sequential applications to exploit the maximum performance that the underlying hardware can deliver. Simplicity and minimal changes are the key objectives of our solution and we call this a HPC Black-box approach. We also show how this can help lower infrastructure investments. We believe that this approach can be used to enable HPC for existing sequential applications using Microsoft Windows HPC Server.