Reuters Microsoft aims to enter supercomputer market - SC|05

364 Pages·2005·2.91 MB·English

Reuters
Tue Nov 15, 2005 6:59 PM ET
Microsoft aims to enter supercomputer market
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research), which
built its business by aiming to put a "computer on every desk" is moving into the high-
end supercomputing market as hardware becomes more affordable, Chairman Bill Gates
said on Tuesday.
The world's largest software maker will offer a version of Windows called "Compute
Cluster Server 2003" that offers high performance computing by tying together several
personal computers in a high-speed network that allows them to crunch huge amounts
of data to simulate weather, analyze DNA and process other research-level tasks.
"Microsoft wants to play a role here," Gates told Supercomputing 2005, an industry
gathering being held in Seattle this week.
Gates said that supercomputers, once considered massive mainframe machines that only
researchers, a few companies and governments could afford, are becoming smaller and
cheaper to the point where a clustered supercomputer system could be built for as little
as $10,000.
The market for computer clusters built on Intel Corp.'s (INTC.O: Quote, Profile,
Research) "x86" microprocessors used in more than 90 percent of PCs is growing at 15
to 20 percent per year, faster than the 11 percent growth in the PC market, and is
expected to swell to as many as 300,000 installed machines by the end of the decade,
Microsoft said.
To tap into that growth and compete against Linux -- the freely available operating
system that is also being used to create clustered computer systems -- Microsoft is set to
launch Computer Cluster Server in the first half of 2006. The latest beta, or test version,
of the software was released on Tuesday.
Kyril Faenov, director of Microsoft's high-performance computing unit, said that the
software will be designed to be easier to use, so that tasks can be displayed visually and
systems can be configured more quickly.
Agence France Presse
Microsoft throws weight behind supercomputer software
15 November 2005
The new software represents Microsoft's first foray into the mainstream technical
computing software market, a competitive arena that features low-cost, open-source
products from companies such as Linux. Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates
announced the release at a Supercomputing 2005 conference in the Washington city of
Seattle and said the company is funding 10 joint research projects at academic centers
worldwide.
Austin Business Journal
UT gets Microsoft research institute
November 15, 2005

Microsoft Corp. will establish a Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing at
the University of Texas and at nine other universities around the world, the software giant
said Tuesday.
"This multiyear, multimillion-dollar investment builds on the relationship we started with
the Cornell Theory Center years ago, and will allow us to understand much more deeply
the requirements and opportunities for applying results of research and innovation in
high-performance computing," says Bob Muglia, a senior vice president at Microsoft
(NASDAQ: MSFT), based in Richmond, Wash.
Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft, unveiled the investment Tuesday at the
Supercomputing 2005 conference in Seattle.
Specific dollar amounts for the project weren't provided. However, a Microsoft
spokeswoman says the company has invested more than $100 million annually in
academic programs over the past five years.
Aside from UT, the Microsoft institutes will be part of existing research centers at
Cornell University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Utah, the University of
Virginia, Russia's Nizhni Novgorod State University, China's Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology, England's University of Southampton
and Germany's University of Stuttgart.
Bio-IT World
SC05 Keynote: Gates on Reducing Time to Insight and Discovery
Page 1 of 2

By Salvatore Salamone, Bio-IT World
November 15, 2005 | Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates
kicked off this year's SC05 conference by sharing his thoughts on how innovations in
high-performance computing (HPC) will improve collaboration and speed research
developments by connecting scientists, computing resources, and data.
The talk was before a standing-room-only crowd that filled three connected ballrooms in
the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle. And while Gates used the
talk to announce the beta 2 release of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the focus
of his keynote was on the changes he expected in how researchers work, as new ways to
use computing resources become available.
Gates noted that several industry megatrends are coming together to alter the way
research is conducted. These include increased processing power of HPC systems,
service-oriented architectures that make it easier to share and access data, new computer
form factors (Tablet PCs, PDAs, cell phones, etc.) that help collect data, and the
digitalization of product design and simulation. "With computer modeling, we're figuring
out what is happening in the real world," said Gates.
As these trends give scientists more data and more-complex data to work with,
researchers "will need new software to figure out what resources are needed to work with
the data," said Gates. One area where he thinks a lot more work must be done is
visualization - to provide insight into and get more value out of data. And he believes
leveraging the megatrends is a way to reach these goals.
Workflows Rule
At a conceptual level, Gates sees computational workflows that leverage the benefits of
megatrends and integrate distinct tasks as the key to speeding insight and discovery.
This workflow includes computational modeling of the physical system being researched;
acquisition of experimental data; searches and incorporation of persistent distributed data
(such as libraries or public databases); and a software core that includes job scheduling,
data mining, and analysis algorithms. All these elements produce information that would
be interpreted by a researcher to get new insight into a problem.
While this approach is used in many organizations today, Gates thinks there are several
opportunities to use newer technologies to improve the process. For instance, he believes
personal supercomputers (systems with supercomputer power that cost less than $10,000,
and that sit next to a researcher's desk) give researchers the ability to quickly develop and
test new models.
SC05 Keynote: Gates on Reducing Time to Insight and Discovery
Page 2 of 2
Additionally he sees new resource management tools helping to provide a transparent
way for
organizations to selectively use computing resources without the scientists having to be
IT managers. For example, when a scientist submits an analysis job, the job could be
assigned to run on a personal supercomputer or a larger cluster based on pre-defined
workload criteria.
Focus on Life Sciences
Gates' talk focused on issues of importance to anyone working with large amounts of
data, computational models, and research and development. But in many parts of the talk,
Gates related how life scientists were using the methods he described.
For example, he called out Kyril Faenov, director of HPC at Microsoft, to demonstrate
how to use these ideas in a research environment. Faenov's demo showed how a cancer
research project was using an iterative data analysis technique to identify biomarkers and
proteomics features in mass spectrometry data. In that demo, different analysis jobs were
run on a local Linux cluster and a remote Windows HPC cluster.
Gates also spoke of an AIDS vaccine design project effort between Microsoft Research,
the University of Washington, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He
noted the project was "the intersection of the advances in science and HPC."
He concluded noting that "the next 10 years will be really exciting, not just in
[computing], but in science."

###
Business Week

Of Supercomputers, Microsoft and Sheryl Crow
By Peter Burrows
November 15, 2005
Want to know how bad Microsoft wants to reassert its role in the world of
supercomputers? Although it just began participating in the 18-year-old SC/05
Supercomputer conference in 2003, Microsoft seems determined to make a splash at the
research-oriented confab, which started today. For starters, chairman Bill Gates is giving
the keynote speech. The company also has a prominent booth on the show floor--
prominent enough to privately rankle some other vendors, who wonder whether the
software giant unfairly threw its money around to win the coveted real estate (not true,
says conference spokesperson Kathyrn Kelley; no other vendor had bid for the spot, she
says, when Microsoft came along).
Why is Microsoft so interested? Because rather than an academic backwater,
supercomputers and other high-performance computing technologies are increasingly
being used by corporations to do sophisticated data-mining and run other business
applications. And more often than not, designers of such systems are looking to Linux,
when Windows might do the trick.
Gates isn't the only starpower Microsoft will aim at the assembled techies. The company,
with help from Intel, will spend nearly $1 million on a party tonight at the swank
Experience Music Project building, says one source with knowledge about the event.
That includes more than $300,000 to pay Sheryl Crow--easily the biggest act to ever hit
the SC/05 post-conference party circuit.
UPDATE: A spokesperson for Microsoft called after this post went up, to say that the bill
for the party was well under $1 million, though he declined to provide a more accurate
estimate. Hearing that, I tracked down another source that is familiar with the event, and
this person also confirmed that the $1 million was significantly too high. Still, the general
point stands. This was a top-shelf affair, by Supercomputer conference standards.
CNET News
Microsoft makes its way to 64-bit chips
By Martin LaMonica
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: November 15, 2005, 11:51 AM PST
Microsoft said some upcoming products, including its Exchange 12 e-mail server,
will run only on 64-bit processors.
At a conference for its management software customers, company executives detailed its
plans to add support 64-bit microprocessors in its server applications and operating
systems.
By late next year, Microsoft expects to deliver Exchange 12, which will run only on x86-
compatible 64-bit servers, said Bob Kelly, general manager of infrastructure server
marketing at Microsoft.
Kelly said 64-bit chips will make the greatest impact on the performance of applications
such as Exchange and its SQL Server database.
"IT professionals will be able to consolidate the total number of servers running 64-bit
(processors) and users will be able to have bigger mailbox size," he said.
Longhorn Server R2 and a small-business edition of Longhorn Server will be available
only for x86-compatible 64-bit chips as well the company's Centro mid-market bundle.
Longhorn server is expected to be released in 2007 and the R2 follow-up could come two
years after that.
Without providing a specific target date, Kelly said that Microsoft is working on a
product called System Center Essentials, which will be a management product aimed
specifically at medium-size companies.
He said Microsoft intends to build application-level monitoring into the forthcoming
version 3 of Microsoft Operations Manager to complement the present hardware-level
monitoring.
Microsoft also said its Microsoft Virtual Server Release 2 will be available in the first
month of December, priced at $99 per server for the standard edition and $199 for the
enterprise version.
ComputerWorld

Gates outlines supercomputing vision
He sees a merging of ‘mass computing’ worldwide with supercomputers
Page 1 of 2

News Story by Patrick Thibodeau

NOVEMBER 15, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - SEATTLE -- Microsoft Corp.
Chairman Bill Gates appeared before thousands of technical computing users today and
forecast supercomputing systems that will cost less than $10,000 and a merging of “mass
computing,” or Windows PCs, with the world’s most powerful systems.
Addressing the Supercomputing 2005 conference here, Gates spoke to a crowd that
makes scant use of the Microsoft operating system in high-performance systems. Gates
sought to cross that divide by stressing the common problems of what he called mass
computing and supercomputing.
“Many of these challenges that we face in software -- connecting machines together,
having parallel algorithms that allow many compute systems to work on a problem and
combine their results together -- these problems are very similar to the problems that exist
in high-end supercomputing,” said Gates.
“Its exciting to think that we can get the best brains from supercomputing and from mass
computing and bring those together and make great progress in the decade ahead,” he
said.
Windows barely registers a pulse in high-end computing. On the latest Top500
supercomputing list, released this week, the breakdown by operating systems has Linux
running nearly 75% of the top 500 systems; Unix has 20%, and Mac OS X is listed at 1%.
Windows isn’t noted at all.
“It is astonishing how they missed out on this altogether,” said John Abbott, an analyst at
The 451 Group in New York, referring to Microsoft’s limited role in high-end technical
computing. It’s important for Microsoft to be recognized in the high-end market “because
that’s where half these technologies, like grid and clustering, are all being proven,” he
said.
Gates said he believes that as chips reach gigahertz speed limits, the need for
“parallelism” becomes more important. The environment he sketched out imagines
desktop supercomputers linked to more powerful clusters in a heterogeneous
environment.
“Microsoft wants to play a role here -- to be a participant and work with partners to see
how our software fits in these solutions,” said Gates. “These solutions will often be
Gates outlines supercomputing vision
Page 2 of 2
extremely heterogeneous.” Making certain that all these systems work together “is just
one element on how software can do a better job,” he added.
Gates also said that Microsoft is reaching out to more supercomputing centers to
understand “what should we be doing with our software, how can it connect up to the
other software that they have in a better way?”
Martin Gasthuber, a researcher at DESY (Deutsche Elektronen-Synchrotron), a high-
energy physics laboratory for basic science research in Hamburg, Germany, was
unimpressed. He said Gates’ talk was about marketing Microsoft products. “For me, it’s
not a vision; it’s the next step he wants to do -- which is coherent with the next generation
of products he has in mind,” said Gasthuber, a researcher at the facility who is working
on storage issues.
But Ted Dodds, CIO for the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said Gates
offered “a very accurate description of current trends in technology and likely future
possibilities.”
Windows clusters are almost inevitable in many respects, said Dodds. This notion “of
mass computing and very technical specializing computing teaming together, I think, is
pretty evident,” especially as researchers turn to low-cost commodity clusters to solve
problems, he said.
“Without going into an open-source model, which I would never expect to see Microsoft
necessarily do, they would develop products that will interoperate seamlessly” with the
dominant open-source platforms, said Dodds.
William Kramer, general chairman of the Supercomputing conference and head of high-
performance computing at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, said Gates’ appearance is an indication of the growing
awareness of supercomputing’s importance. “The output of [high-performance
computing] activities are no longer hidden behind a curtain, if you will,” he said.
Supercomputing is “being scaled down so more people can make use of these very
complicated tools -- and I think that’s one of the indications of Microsoft’s interest here,”
Kramer said.

###
Good Morning Silicon Valley

Hi, I'm Clippy, your supercomputing assistant; you look like you're
trying to model complex atmospheric phenomena

November 15, 2005
Figuring it's got plain old computing down pat, Microsoft is trying its hand at
supercomputing. Bill Gates himself is introducing a test version of a new product,
Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, today at the SC\05, a supercomputing
conference held this year in Seattle (get those Windows Cluster jokes out of your system
right now). With the move, Microsoft is pushing into territory currently dominated by
Linux powered machines run mainly in academic settings, and as John Oates at The
Register notes, "Such academic and research units are usually staffed not by Linux
enthusiasts but Linux obsessives. Academic ideals of peer-review and openness have
further helped Linux gain ground. This is a new and not necessarily friendly market for
Microsoft to join." But Microsoft seems less interested in the entrenched market and
more interested in parlaying low cost (company engineers put together demo clusters for
under $4,000 using store-bought hardware) and familiar administrative features to bring
serious computing muscle to businesses. "What we're seeing is, as the price comes down
and advanced applications trickle down from academia, they're really being picked up by
enterprise [businesses]," said Kyril Faenov, Microsoft director of high-performance
computing. At the event today, HP will announce plans to sell high-performance
Windows systems alongside its Linux offerings, and Microsoft says it's talking to other
manufacturers.
Meanwhile, the latest rankings of the world's fastest computers are out, and the big
winner is IBM, holding the top three spots and five of the top nine.