Working with High Performance Computing resources (scale up vs. scale out in the Microsoft World) - Init

<body> <h1>Working with High Performance Computing resources (scale up vs. scale out in the Microsoft World)</h1> <p><a href="http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/sanderberkouwer/hpns_servidor_web_160x196px_3FA0ACB9.png"><img style="background-image:none;border-right-width:0px;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0px;display:inline;float:right;border-top-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;padding-top:0px;" title="hpns_servidor_web_160x196px" border="0" alt="hpns_servidor_web_160x196px" align="right" src="http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/sanderberkouwer/hpns_servidor_web_160x196px_thumb_3E5C13DA.png" width="160" height="196" /></a>This week I got the chance to work with some x86 High Performance Computing hardware at the Donald Smits Center for Information Technology (CIT) at the <a href="http://www.rug.nl">University of Groningen</a>.</p> <p>Their hardware typically contains more than 64 logical processors and TBs of RAM. 10Gb/s interconnects and loads of Solid State Disks (SSDs) are also not very uncommon in their daily routines. I had the chance to work with systems like Dell’s PowerEdge R910 G11 and HP’s ProLiant DL980, which were labeled as spare hardware. With a 40k € price tag, each, this is no cheap pile of iron. </p> <p>Installing Windows Server on these systems is easy, since Windows Server Datacenter runs on hardware with 256 logical processors and 2 TB of RAM for almost three years. (<a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2009/07/22/windows-server-2008-r2-rtm.aspx">Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM’d on July 22, 2009</a>) </p> <p>High Performance Computing hardware is useful in ‘number crunching’ and ‘database’ scenarios. In the first scenario a multithreaded application is used on the hardware to analyze data. Commonly this data amounts to PBs per week/month. In the second scenario the hardware is used as a database solution. </p> <p>A third viable scenario would be a highly-efficient x86 virtualization solution. You can build this on top of Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition with Hyper-V. With Hyper-V guests now capable of addressing 32 logical processors and 1 TB RAM, each, running a couple of these VMs can easily account for the purchase of typical High Performance Computing (HPC) hardware. </p> <p><strong>I would advice against using HPC hardware as virtualization hosts.</strong></p> <p>First, let me address the use cases for number crunching: For most of these cases Microsoft offers <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/hpc">Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server</a>. In this version of Windows Server, a large amount of  standard hardware servers (“compute nodes”) are combined with the use of a supervisor server (“head node”) into a high performance cluster (with or without the help of additional “broker nodes” and “Job schedulers”).<strong> The method used is scale-out. </strong>If you have serious High Performance Computing (HPC) needs, you can use lots of HP DL980s as compute nodes. </p> <p>Now, for virtualization. Although a single HP DL980 server is more than capable of running the VMs for a typical office automation setup, this is not ideal for the following reasons:</p> <ol> <li>When the server malfunctions, all VMs will malfunction or go offline. This can be solved by adding a second server and shared storage and transform the two servers into a Windows Cluster. To avoid a “Dutch Cluster”, though, the second node will not be active to allow the VMs to resume/replica onto the second server. This is a terrifying amount of waste of resources. With more smaller nodes, a smaller amount of resources is needed for redundancy, and thus a smaller amount of resources is wasted. The Dell R910 we saw recently encountered memory problems and ran more safely in memory-redundancy mode. More DIMMs in use simply increases the chance of one of them failing. <br />    </li> <li>You might assume a bigger piece of iron scales like a smaller piece of iron, but it doesn’t. A Server like a HP DL980 uses the same type of RAM (DDR3) as its little brothers. It simple takes a </li></ol></body>