Interviewers: Scott Swigart, and Sean Campbell
Interviewee: Ryan Waite
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| Ryan Waite |
In this interview, we talk with Ryan Waite, Group Program Manager for High-Performance Computing at Microsoft. We talk about:
- Microsoft’s entry into the High Performance Computing area.
- Microsoft’s support of the open source Message Passing Interface (MPI).
- MPI has become bloated, and there’s no usability data (like there is with Microsoft Office) to indicate what should be deprecated.
- At Microsoft, select customers help shape the features for the next product release.
- Microsoft has always focused on ease of use, simplified administration, and uncomplicated setup. HPC is no different.
- Instrumentation helps find reliability issues. If partners are affecting reliability (with unstable drivers, for example) certification helps raise the bar.
- Parallel programming is now the only way to do more computation in the same amount of time. Processors just are getting faster like they used to.
- It’s easier for open source to be incremental. Proprietary software has to make radical changes.
- Hard drives + overnight shipping = really high bandwidth.
