I've been working on Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 for nearly six months now and I've decided it is time to start posting some of my thoughts and discoveries. Today I feel inspired to write about the Windows 7 capabilities of the platform.

Motivation

I recently modified a BizTalk solution that had been largely functioning as a grid computing platform to start using HPC 2008 R2. The hardware this system ran on is dated at this point, but the solution is CPU intensive (extremely) and even older hardware can still crunch numbers quite well. Moreover part of the move to HPC was because BizTalk is not really made for massively parallel computations (and by massive I've mean tens if not hundreds of processing nodes).

Some of this hardware was still 32bit and I found myself unable to install HPC 2008 R2 on it. I thought I had hit a snag. Then I learned a little more about HPC's new ability to enlist Windows 7 workstations into an HPC cluster as workstation nodes. To me this is one of the most exciting features of a platform that I think is full of exciting features. Basically here's how it works.

An HPC agent is installed on Windows 7 machines that can be either 32bit or 64 bit. The head node (I'll blog about HPC architecture later, but for now it's basically the management node) is then configured with a policy listing the workstations and when they can be used. If this weren't cool already the workstation node agent can also detect if the user is actually using the node and decrease its participation in the cluster automatically if a user begins using the workstation.

So where does this leave us?

If you have large processing jobs that can be parallelized (another blog post) and you have workstations in your enterprise running Windows 7 Professional or Enterprise then you can have your own super computer.

So who all can benefit from this?

Many insurance companies I've worked with process actuarial models or financial statements that require immense calculations. They also tend to have lots of workstation used by the insurance business. They can have their own supercomputer. Trading firms doing technical analysis can also use these features. Universities can provide supercomputing capability to their students with hardware they already have. This last one interests me a lot because computer science students can work with students and researchers from other parts of the university to solve problems that previously were simply not feasible. Large universities have hundreds or thousands of workstations available AND the need for massive computing power.