Microsoft yesterday announced some enhancements to Windows Azure which allow customers to run applications that require large amounts of compute power also known as Big Compute. By providing Big Compute capabilities customers can leverage the Cloud scaling capabilities to support their ever-growing need for compute power.
In order to demonstrate the capabilities Microsoft ran a LINPACK benchmark resulting in a 151.3 Tflops on 8,065 cores with 90,2 efficiency, and Microsoft therefore submitted the data to be included in the Top 500 of the world’s largest supercomputers.
The capabilities include:
Hardware for Big Compute, which is currently in a private preview and is expected to become available in 2013. Microsoft is planning to offer 2 configurations, a 8 core/60GB of RAM and a 16 core/120GB of RAM configuration, running on top of machines with the following specifications:
- Dual Intel Sandybridge processors at 2.6 GHz
- DDR3 1600 MHz RAM
- 10 GigE network for storage and internet access
- InfiniBand (IB) 40 Gbps network with RDMA
Microsoft HPC Pack 2012, allows customers to run workloads on Windows Azure, on-premise or both in a hybrid scenario. The 2012 version will add support for Windows Server 2012, VPN integration for access to on-premises resources, job execution control for dependencies, job scheduling policies for memory and cores, monitoring tools and utilities and is expected to be released in December this year.