Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack SDK

Brief Description

The SDK for Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack is designed to help you develop high performance applications on Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 platform.

Overview

The Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack Software Development Kit helps you create high performance parallel applications for Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. The SDK contains executable binaries for Microsoft MPI. It also contains C and FORTRAN headers and libraries for developing parallel applications using Microsoft MPI and includes application programming interfaces for integration with Microsoft Job Scheduler.

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System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows XP

Using this SDK does not require a cluster of 64 bit computers.

Here is what you need:

Minimum Hardware Required: At least one industry standard personal computer (either 32-bit or 64-bit) with at least 128MB RAM, a monitor and a keyboard.

Supported Operating Systems: The SDK does not require the system to be member of a domain. Any one of the following operating systems may be used with the SDK. Please make sure to install all the latest updates available from Microsoft Update site.

Windows XP Professional 32-bit
Windows XP Professional x64 edition
Windows Server 2003 32-bit
Windows Server 2003 x64 edition

Cluster behavior can be emulated by running multiple processes on a single computer, for example,

mpiexec -n 10 sample.exe

will start 10 instances of sample.exe.

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Instructions

Installation:

The SDK installation is fairly simple. Just pick either 32-bit or 64-bit MSI installer package depending on the system you are using. The installer will walk you though the SDK setup process.

Application Development:

The applications developed for the Microsoft Compute Cluster Server 2003 can be either 32-bit or 64-bit. 32-bit applications developed for Microsoft Compute Cluster Server 2003 can run on clusters of 64-bit hardware running 64-bit versions of Windows Server.

Target platform for your applications:

The SDK will help you create high performance applications for the Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 platform. Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 would require one or more industry standard x64 hardware (either AMD64 or Intel EM64T chips) interconnected together via Gigabit, Infiniband or Myrinet. Several nodes connected together will constitute a compute cluster. The compute cluster node hardware must always be x64 (either Intel EM64T or AMD64) running a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 on each of the nodes within the compute cluster. One such node is configured as the head node and other nodes are configured as compute nodes. Head node can function as a compute node as well. All these nodes need to be joined to a domain controller. If the cluster is being set up in an island configuration with no external connectivity to a domain controller, then the head node needs to be configured as a domain controller and the compute nodes need to be added to it as domain members. If you need help in setting up the headnode as a domain controller, please refer to Step-by-Step Guide to a Common Infrastructure for Windows Server 2003 Deployment at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/directory/activedirectory/stepbystep/domcntrl.mspx

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Additional Information

Visual Studio 2005 offers a variety of high performance computing features. Of particular note are the following:

Debugging of parallel applications:
Now you can debug MPI and other parallel programs with the debugger. It can automatically attach to jobs started on separate processes over multiple computers (or on the same one). Plus it adds the ability to set breakpoints and get variables, at process level granularity! More information and documentation on how to debug a remote cluster application is available on MSDN at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms164731(en-US,VS.80).aspx

Full OpenMP 2.0 support:
This allows you to use the popular OpenMP API to write multithreaded programs, even incorporating .NET based programming.

64-bit support:
Visual Studio 2005 offers full 64-bit support, to allow you to write applications not possible in the past.

Profile guided optimization:
This allows the compiler to generate the most optimized code for your program based on real-world profiles that are generated by scenarios you supply.

New floating point model:
With the new floating point model you can get a good combination of accuracy and precision, very consistent IEEE compatible results, or the fastest floating point code. It gives you flexibility to choose which would work best for your application.

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