geekSpeak Recording: Programming for High-Performance Computing Environments with Dariusz Parys and

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We're always trying to dig up esoteric subjects for geekSpeak, and here's one that is intriguing - High Performance Computing. Once strictly the domain of universities and the like, HPC is quickly becoming a cornerstone of business analysis, engineering and number crunching in general.

This geekSpeak features several Microsoft folks from Germany, including Developer Evangelist Dariusz Parys, Platform Strategy Manager Christian Binder and infrastructure specialist Steffen Krause.

These fine gentlemen get us all familiar with key aspects of developing and managing applications for a high-performance computing environment. Steffen gives a great overview of a typical infrastructure layout, which includes Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. We get some great tips for handling multi-threading through the use of OpenMP, as well as an overview of using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to handle the communication to the cluster.

Steffen shares with us some information around using Excel services on Sharepoint actually installed on a cluster to provide some serious horsepower for server-based calculations. And we hear about a specific HPC scenario from Sorin Serban, with Visual Numerics, involving some amazingly complex algorithms.

All in all, a fascinating geekSpeak on the possiblities that high-performance computing offers.