Continuing with my HPC adventures I thought I'd give a quick overview of what HPC is and how it works.

HPC is Windows High Performance Computing platform, part of the Technical Computing initiative out of Microsoft. The goal is to create a grid computing platform that is simpler to setup, run, and use. Microsoft has a long and successful track record of making complex computing tasks much easier and it is refreshing to see them continue to bring these resources to bear on Technical Computing.

First things first, what is HPC? HPC is a technology built on top of Windows to handle massive parallel processing. Massive parallel processing is the modern day replacement of supercomputing. HPC is the Microsoft approach to large scale parallel processing and is even compatible with of MPI. I've worked with MPI in the past and used to be quite into Linux, but I never thought grid computing could be made this simple. That said it's still distributed computing, it's still difficult, but now you can focus on the real problems and get the infrastructure down more easily.

In HPC 2008 R2 the cluster is made up of nodes that play different roles.

Head Node

This node is the brain of a cluster. It provides management and scheduling for the cluster.

Broker Node

This node is the node that dishes out request across the cluster and aggregates their responses. This node now runs WCF services that make integrating with HPC much easier.

Compute Node

This is where the rubber meets the road so to speak. These nodes actually carry out processing. You can even use Windows 7 Professional or Enterprise workstations as compute nodes, which I recently blogged about.

As I cover more features of HPC I will show how you can use the product to create node templates and then use iSCSI to boot nodes directly into templates that enlist them in the cluster about as effortlessly as one can imagine (well, better than I could have imagined). The best part is in my labs I was even able to use Windows Storage Server to host these drives.