University of Southampton

CCS battles Climate Change

ktakeda — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:52:00 GMT

Read about the Southampton Institute's work on a unified earth systems modelling system. Combining the power of CCS, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation and SQL Server 2005, environmental scientists are now able to carry out experiments that they weren't even dreaming about a few years ago.

Read the full case study here...

Compute Cluster User Group meeting success!

ktakeda — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 18:40:00 GMT

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 :)

First Ever UK Compute Cluster Server User Group Open Day!

ktakeda — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:28:00 GMT

The Microsoft Institute for HPC at Southampton (www.mihpc.net) is organising the first Compute Cluster User Group Meeting with Microsoft UK. So if you can get to Reading UK on 27 April 2007 then come along to hear what users are doing with Windows Compute Cluster, and get the latest views from the product team.

Click here to sign-up, it's free!

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032334086&Culture=en-GB

"The day will feature presentations from users and developers, including the Microsoft development team, Microsoft Research and meetings with key Microsoft executives. Users from engineering, finance, academia and manufacturing will be present.

Come and exchange experience and practices with your peers, and Microsoft."

27 April 2007

08:30 Registration

09:15 Introductions

09:30 Windows Compute Cluster Server introduction

10:00 Prof Simon Cox - Tools, Technologies and Platforms for High Productivity Computing"

10:30 Break

10:45 Prof Mike Giles- Monte Carlo calculations in finance

11:15 Graham Twaddle, Corporate Modelling - Clusters as Mainframes: Batch Processing

11:45 Ryan Waite - Microsoft Roundtable

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Fabrizio Gagliardi - Technical Computing at Microsoft

14:00 Prof Andy Keane - CFD and design optimisation on Compute Cluster Server"

14:30 Break

15:00 CFD on CCS

15:30 Ryan Waite- Compute Cluster Futures

16:00 Close

Aircraft design simulation becomes supercharged..

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:39:00 GMT

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.

The consortium is led by Airbus and includes the Aircraft Research Association, BAE Systems, BMT Fluid Mechanics Limited, Eurostep, Frazer-Nash Consultancy (representing DML Group), Hewlett-Packard, IT Innovation, MBDA, Microsoft, PCA Engineers, Quadrics, QinetiQ, Rolls-Royce, AgustaWestland, Williams F1 and University of Southampton.

Read the full press release @ http://www.gnn.gov.uk/Content/Detail.asp?ReleaseID=263399&NewsAreaID=2

Sun, sea and supercomputers...

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:38:00 GMT

Another November, another Supercomputing conference (SC'06). This year we were in Tampa, Florida, a nice change from grey and rainy Southampton. It certainly was hot, in the 80s Fahrenheit, but the thunderstorms are pretty torrential too!

We were honoured to be part of the huge Microsoft stand again, which is very exciting as Windows Compute Cluster Server is now a real product. Two of our videos were running on the big Plasma screen in between booth talks. The folks opposite on the Pacific Nortwest Labs stand now know more than they ever wanted to about our BAE Systems CFD project, and the Smallpeice Trust 'Computers in Engineering' course we ran in July!

This year our demo was pretty cool, pushing the .NET 3 Framework, using Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and Globus 2 accessing Windows Compute Cluster. We were performing whole Earth System simulations (atmosphere + ocean) to investigate scenarios of the Gulf Stream switching on and off. Running all of this from inside a web browser, with WPF, was one of the first times anyone had seen such Web 2.0 technology being used in anger - even the Microsoft folks ;)

I'll post more about the demo on our MIHPC site (www.mihpc.net) soon!

My colleague, Simon Cox, had some fun cruising around Tampa showing how supercomputing affects our everyday lives. Check out the video at www.winhpc.org .

Bright sparks in Brussels - EU Innovation Day

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:34:00 GMT

Well, November 9th was an interesting day... A quick trip to Brussels to the Microsoft Executive Briefing Centre for the Microsoft Research EU Innovation Day 2006. These have been running for a few years now, and it is an opportunity for Microsoft to show off all of the funky research they are doing in Europe and around the world!

This year we were invited to showcase the work we're doing in the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing (www.mihpc.net).

There were lots of people rushing around, as not only was Bill Gates coming to give a keynote speech, but so was the EU President, Matti Vanhanen. Their speeches were very interesting, discussing why innovation in Europe is not as fruitful as in other regions, and what can be done to help.

The exhibition was fascinating, you can read more about it on the website...
http://www.euinnovationday.com/

For piccies of the event, go straight here... http://www.eventattitude.net/innovationday

Windows Workflow Foundation details...

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:31:00 GMT

If you want to see how Windows Workflow Foundation can be used for technical computing, then you can read the Southampton Institute's paper entitled 'Leveraging Windows Workflow Foundation for Scientific Workflows in Wind Tunnel Applications' here...

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~ktakeda/downloads/SciFlow06PersonalUse.pdf

Find out more about Windows Workflow Foundation here...

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663328.aspx

And keep up to date with Paul Andrew's blog @ http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/default.aspx

Southampton Institute poster gallery

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:28:00 GMT

Find out more about what's happening at the Southampton Institute for HPC by downloading our posters @ http://www.soton.ac.uk/ses/research/mshpci/posters.html

Supercomputing is child's play

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:16:00 GMT

Can you build a Windows supercomputer from parts and run a parallel Fluent CFD calculation for an airliner in a day?

The HPC Institute at Southampton set this challenge to a dozen 17 year olds, and they did it! Not only that, they flew their designs in Microsoft Flight Simulator too :)

See the video to find out more:

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~ktakeda/temp/2305_Smallpeice_Trust_02.10.06.wmv

This residential course at Southampton was run by the Smallpeice Trust, and was sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge. Powered by Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, of course!

Windows Workflow, SQL Server and Compute Cluster Server 2003

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:06:00 GMT

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

Spitfire cluster gains its wings

ktakeda — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:02:00 GMT

The Spitfire compute cluster at Southampton is now flying high, with very high utilisation on projects from aeroacoustics and electromagnetics, to environmental science and genetic optimisation of Rolls-Royce engines.

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.

For more details see the poster at: http://www.soton.ac.uk/ses/research/mshpci/posters.html

or read the launch press release at: http://www.soton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2006/jun/06_75.shtml

HPC Institute, University of Southampton - Project and Hardware

DennisCr — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:15:00 GMT

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)