Intel, Sun and Microsoft have shown off strategies designed to make each the vendor of choice to take high-performance computing into mainstream environments.

At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden this week, Intel detailed two programmes designed to accelerate HPC deployments. 

Cluster Ready is intended to provide an off-the-shelf way to deploy clusters and a single target for software developers to validate against. Having a settled spec would assist interoperability testing and offer “peace of mind”, Intel said.

“It’s designed to make it easier to design, deploy and develop clusters,” said Herbert Cornelius, Intel’s Advanced Computing Centre director.

“This is the sweet spot and the volume segment, especially for industrial use. Cluster Ready specifies platform functionality and provides a tool to check everything is working and available. This makes it faster to develop applications for clusters, with reduced support and validation cost. We’re bringing more standardisation into a very fragmented situation where a lot of vendors have their own specifications and that puts a lot of burden on the software developers.”

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said, “One of the things that Intel's talked about a bit as part of its strategy to improve its position in the x86 space is showing a greater willingness to work with OEM partners to develop optimised product for their particular needs. I see some of Intel's work with SGI as an example of this. Intel is creating a specialised building block and SGI is creating the packaging, interconnects, and various other pieces to make it all work.”

Cornelius said the Xeon-based Cluster Ready framework is currently focused on Linux -- “as that is 98 percent of the market” -- but added that Intel is in discussions with Microsoft about supporting Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS).

Separately, Intel said its new Connects Cables extend to 100 metres, and are over 80 percent lighter and smaller, helping to solve setup of clusters.

Sun said it would offer its Solaris Cluster technology to the open-source community in a move that could challenge Linux as the dominant force in the sector.

“Currently, there is no production-level commercial cluster system for open-source people to use as a base,” Sun Solaris marketing director Paul Steeves told IT Week sister title VNUnet.

The firm also showed off its Constellation System, a supercomputing platform it argued offers significant energy savings.

Microsoft will team up with HP to make its HPC operating system, Windows CCS, available on HP’s ProLiant, BladeSystem and Cluster servers.

Although HPC is traditionally associated with academic and scientific applications, Microsoft insists there is plenty of scope to give it a broader role.

In a statement, Microsoft cited IDC research, stating that the HPC sector is growing at over 20 percent per year as buyers seek low-administration systems for desktop use in a broader variety of tasks such as financial analysis routines and media rendering.

Illuminata’s Haff said, “We do see Microsoft making some gains in what I'll call commercial HPC and other -- mostly small to medium-scale –- deployments where Microsoft already has a footprint. However, I wouldn't take any of that to suggest we'll see Microsoft making big inroads in more traditional scientific HPC anytime soon.”

Professor Simon Cox of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing at Southampton University, said, “The fact is that Microsoft is bringing HPC power to new sectors like 3D animation and digital content creation. That’s an important message.”

HP and Microsoft also said they would work with Ansys to offer computer-aided engineering capabilities to customers.