New NUMA Support with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7

Windows Server 2008 R2 represents the latest evolution of the Windows Server operating system and corresponding support for high-end hardware systems with large numbers of microprocessors.  Windows Server 2008 R2 is the first release of Windows to scale beyond 64 Logical Processors (LP) on a single computer.

R2 features enhanced support of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) computer architectures along with new User-Mode Thread Scheduling (UMS) technology.  UMS enables custom thread-level scheduling within your own application.  For certain categories of computing scenarios, this avoids the overhead of thread kernel transitions and context switching.

Why is this important for Application Developers?  New commodity computer systems will soon appear that leverage many-core architectures.  A system with 4 CPU sockets, 8 processor-cores per socket and with Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) enabled per core, will readily achieve 64 Logical Processors.  Application Developers will want to ensure their applications scale well on this new generation of high-performance commodity systems.

This presentation illustrates enhancements made to the Windows API to support more than 64 processors and enhanced NUMA support.  Find detailed NUMA API usage scenarios at Code Gallery.

See related sessions on NUMA, UMS, and Concurrency.