During the intitial Community Test Preview [CTP] of Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, Microsoft leaked details that they were also working on a new toolpack for the release. Ryan Waite, Product Unit Manager for Windows HPC Server, indicated that an integral part of the new toolset was a tuning utility designed to optimize Windows HPC Server platforms for the Linpack benchmark. Lizard, as its called, is now available for download via the HPC Pack 2008 Tool Pack.
This release of the HPC Pack 2008 Tool Pack contains 1 tool. Lizard – Lizard helps you to determine the computational performance and efficiency that can be achieved by your HPC Pack 2008-based / Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. It calculates and reports a peak performance value for your HPC cluster in billions of floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS), and a percentage value for the efficiency that was achieved at peak performance. After running Lizard, you can review the performance and efficiency results that were obtained, and optionally save these results and the parameters that were used to achieve them to a file on your computer,” Microsoft explained.
After yesterday’s Top500 release, Microsoft found themselves in the fifteenth spot with the Shanghai China Supercomputing Center Magic Cube machine. No direct word on what else is contained in the tool pack.
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