Windows HPC Server cleared for take-off....

At the I/ITSEC 2008 simulation show we were pleased to be able to show, for the first-time, a Microsoft ESP flight simulator working together with Windows HPC Server 2008 This demo involved a lot of technology to make it work. We used Microsoft ESP as the flight simulator front-end, talking to Windows HPC Server 2008 via a Windows Communication Foundation Broker Node. This new Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) capability is brand new. On the cluster-side we were running an MPI (Message-Passing Interface) based Computational Fluid Dynamics code on 128 cores. In order to transfer data we used the Microsoft Distributed Cache service 'Velocity'. All of this together allowed us to calculate the air flow over a ship interacting with the rotor downwash of a helicopter attempting to land! You can read all about in in our paper here.