Creating the Personal Supercomputer

As computing power has increased so have the complexities of our computer simulations. We’re at a point now where many scientists, engineers, and researchers are hitting the upper limit of their high end workstations, further driving the need for supercomputing resources. Microsoft’s goal in entering the high performance computing space is to enable what we call “personal supercomputing” which sounds like an oxymoron. What we want to do is move super computing resources out of distant labs and bring them closer to the people that use those resources. In most cases it would be a workgroup sized system with 32 or 64 nodes, but in the most extreme case, the personal supercomputing case, it would mean a small 4-8 node cluster sitting in a scientist’s office running off 15 amp wall power. Come hear why we think this is the direction of supercomputing and how we’ll make it a reality.