Can Microsoft make it in the super league?

IBM’s latest supercomputer, said to be the first to deliver a petaflop of performance ­ a million gigaflops ­ is a mine of mind-boggling statistics. Named Roadrunner after the official state bird of New Mexico, the system uses over 6,000 AMD Opteron chips combined with over 12,000 IBM Cell processors.

The system has 98TB of memory, and is separated into 17 “connect units”, which are blocks of 180 compute nodes, with each node consisting of two dual-socket Cell blades and a single Opteron blade.

Roadrunner cost £60m to build, covers 6,000 square feet and weighs over 220 tons. Later this summer, it will be loaded onto 21 trailer trucks and transported to the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Here it will be used for nuclear weapons safety and reliability simulations, to make sure that US nukes only go off when they are supposed to.

If you are curious about what operating system Roadrunner uses, the answer is Red Hat Linux. In fact, most high-performance computing (HPC) systems use non-Microsoft environments, a state of affairs that the software giant has been trying to change for years.

At the recent International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Microsoft announced a new release candidate for its HPC Server 2008 package, and revealed that it had managed to break into the list of the world’s top 25 supercomputers, coming in at number 23 with a system used by the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

So why is Microsoft lagging behind? Well, it may be because firms normally use HPC systems in highly critical parts of their operations. For example, energy companies use them in prospecting for new gas fields, while pharmaceutical firms use them in designing new drugs.

In scenarios such as these, every second of compute time is valuable, so when system problems occur, the faster the fix the better. The idea of having to get on the phone to Microsoft tech support does not sit too well with those whose business it is to keep the numbers crunching. But with Linux systems, anyone can have access to the source code, which means problems take less time to resolve.

But demand for Microsoft HPC kit is finally beginning to pick up. Viglen chief executive Bordan Tkachuk said that his company is definitely seeing more interest in the technology.

It seems that firms that already use Windows on their corporate networks are now more easily swayed into using Microsoft’s HPC platform. Demand from financial firms is said to be particularly strong. Apparently, many of the institutions most responsible for the current credit crunch are now installing HPC systems to perform risk analysis ­ in an effort not to get caught with their trousers down next time.

The builders of HPC systems are thus among the few to benefit from the problems currently affecting global financial markets. Some financial firms are even analysing historical data in an effort to pinpoint why they got caught out.

You have to wonder, though, whether it really requires an expensive piece of HPC equipment to work out that selling over-priced houses to people who can’t really afford them and dishing out credit cards like confetti maybe isn’t the most sustainable business model.