Windows at NCSA

[chuckr]

Windows HPC Server 2008

From Microsoft's 'NCSA Video':

Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) are tackling some of the most important problems facing the world today. A common element among the workloads of NCSA's customers is modeling and simulation; however, many of their customers claim that today's high-performance computing systems are too difficult to use and too complicated to program. NCSA has found that Windows HPC Server 2008, with its familiar tools and interfaces, provides a solution to these challenges.

This video focuses on Abe, the computer NCSA used for making a TOP500 run. In four hours, NCSA installed Windows HPC Server 2008 on 1200 compute nodes, utilizing 9600 processing cores. They achieved a performance of 68.5 teraflops, corresponding to 77.7 percent efficiency. In addition, because nodes can be booted from Linux or Windows as needed, this configuration provides NCSA with the flexibility and Linux interoperability that their customers require.

77.7 % -- Fancy that...

No 'percentages' for the other guy...