Microsoft's big little numbers

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Today Microsoft announced something big in a little number. NCSA put one of its systems, the 9000+ core Abe system, on the latest Top500 list at number 23.

Microsoft logoToday at the International Supercomputing Conference, Microsoft Corp. debuted in the top 25 of the world’s top 500 largest supercomputers with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which ranked at No. 23 with 68.5 teraflops. The company also announced that the release candidate version of Windows HPC Server 2008 will be available for download in the last week of June.

The company also pegged a second system in the Top50

Similarly, computer scientists at Umea University in northern Sweden, also working with the beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 on their supercluster, achieved 46 teraflops and 85.5 percent efficiency on 5,376 cores, making their system the second-largest Windows cluster ever deployed and the fastest academic cluster in Sweden. Umea University will run the new supercomputer at its facility known as HPC2N. The university’s cluster employs 672 IBM blade servers, and also marks the first time that Windows HPC Server 2008 has been run publicly on IBM hardware.

For more on this and my interview with Microsoft’s Ryan Waite, check HPCwire.com tomorrow. In the meantime there is an interesting movie about the installation and NCSA’s experiences on Microsoft’s web site (click on the wmv link at the far right).