Customer Case Study
Tokyo Institute of Technology
3/10/2009
Technology Institute Expands Research Initiatives with High-Performance Computing
Tokyo Institute of Technology uses high-performance computing (HPC) to accelerate its research. It deployed a 32-node Windows® HPC Server 2008 GPU-accelerated cluster to take advantage of enhanced tools to configure graphics processing units, which are critical to its research. The institute has found that the HPC solution provides intuitive, integrated tools for greater configuration flexibility, straightforward deployment, and easy management.
Industry: Universities
Size: Large, 1759 employees
Country: Japan  Japan

Customer Profile
http://www.titech.ac.jp
With a 125-year history, Tokyo Institute of Technology is the largest science and technology university in Japan. The institute currently serves approximately 10,000 students each year.
Business Situation
Tokyo Tech needed a HPC solution that could handle a wide range of graphic processing unit (GPU) configurations. However, they found that there was a lack of tools to support GPU configurations for the Linux operating system.
Solution
Tokyo Tech decided to deploy a GPU-accelerated HPC cluster running on the Windows® HPC Server 2008 operating system in collaboration with Microsoft® Research.
Benefit
  • Greater choice of tools
  • Intuitive deployment, use, and management
  • Solid performance
  • Increased user productivity
Software
  • Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008
Quote
"When working on Linux, we needed to learn a variety of tools that have been developed by a number of different vendors and manufacturers. Microsoft provides all the necessary components for running the cluster. With Windows, there's predictability in how the tools look, feel, and work, which makes it easier to run jobs and helps us accomplish more in the same amount of time."
Naoya Maruyama
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.