Thanks to the 70+ participants for making the world's first CCS User Group meeting at Microsoft UK HQ such a success. An amazing 95% turnout, which is unheard of for such a gathering, especially for a sunny Friday! Simon Cox, of the Southampton Institute for HPC, hosted the show, which covered everything from financial applications, real-world grid deployment, to improving reliability of aircraft engines, and Excel on CCS.

Special thank sto Gordon Frazer, MD of Microsoft UK, for spending time with us and fielding a host of interesting quesrtions on CCS, Vista and all things Microsoft. The assembled crowd of users, OEMs and ISVs certainly didn't give him an easy time!

Of great interest was the discussion on CCS version 2, led by Ryan Waite and John Vert, who flew out to the UK from Redmond. Also thanks to Jeff Wierer for enlightening us on the world of High performance Excel Services - fascinating!

For a couple of pics of the event, check out Mike Pallot's HPC & Search Blog here.

Stay posted here for more community activity as it evolves :)

Today sees the announcement of a £17.4m CFMS UK project to enhance computer simulation productivity in aerospace, motorsports and marine sectors. The Southampton Institute for HPC is a partner, working with Microsoft to develop key architecture, tools and technologies to radically improve the engineering experience.

In a recent project wih BAE Systems, the Institute at Southampton developed a proof-of-concept system for improving productivity of aircraft designers. By combining Windows Workflow (.NET 3.0), SQl Server 2005 and Compute Cluster Server 2003, we were able to show how Microsoft's stack seamlessly integrates together to create a usable and useful environment for engineers.

See for yourselves by watching the video... http://www.microsoft.com/uk/press/videos/2302_Master_8th_June.wvx

Read more about it on Marc Holmes' blog here http://www.marcmywords.org/PermaLink,guid,a862e27e-6005-4d69-a8e3-0ceec37dfc0f.aspx

Project Description

Distributed Service Oriented Engineering Design

YourGrid.Net: ‘our technology your grid’

Prof Simon Cox and Dr Kenji Takeda

Microsoft HPC Institute - Southampton University

School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, UK

The application of numerical optimisation in engineering design using sophisticated modelling and analysis tools can provide a vital competitive edge to companies. Engineering design is an iterative, multidisciplinary process that is often data intensive and computationally expensive due to the application of high fidelity analysis models for the simulations of physical phenomena. In the past few decades, engineering design has become increasingly dependent on computing and IT to underpin the process of design from initial modelling and analysis through optimisation to fabrication and testing of prototypes. We demonstrate why, where, and how we are exploiting current and future Microsoft tools and technologies to make the engineering design process faster, cheaper and better.

In particular, we currently use:

·    Microsoft Cluster Compute Edition to provide ‘high performance’ capability computing,

·    Microsoft tooling to build Open Standards based Web Services for access to distributed capacity computing resources and to integrate heterogeneous resources,

·    Windows Communication Framework to provide a secure, reliable and transacted messaging framework,

·    WinFS and SQL server for data handling and integration, and

·    Tablet PC technology for users to interact with all aspects of the design process.

Demo Cluster Version 1 (SC'05)

OUR  DEMO+TEST CLUSTER VERSION 1 (as used for demo at SuperComputing'05):

·    Dual Opteron 246 HE (single core, low power version, revision E, 2.0GHz)

·    CC nodes virtualised with VMWare, with a third machine used as domain controller, firewall and web service host.

·    Gigabit Ethernet

·    We use 1 NIC per node.  As our cluster is virtualised we decided to keep the configuration simple as additional virtual NICs in a VMware node would not give much performance benefit (as the virtual NICs would still share one physical NIC as only one NIC was available).  We will look into installing more physical NICs for later test clusters, although this will not be required on the final production cluster.

Spitfire Production Cluster (June 2006)

The cluster consists of 64bit dual-core AMD Opteron based machines that support a total of 304 independent processes, 800GB memory and 30TB storage space. Software installed on the cluster includes Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, MS SQL Server 2005, Windows Workflow Foundation, Fluent and Matlab.