Open Source or Free .NET HPC Implementations

Question

I'm trying to find out how feasible it would be to create a compute grid using Windows XP, Vista and 7 machines. I know that there is already Windows HPC Server 2008 out there, but when looking into the cost it was basically a situation of if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

I did find MPI.NET, however this looks like it hasn't been updated in nearly two years, so I'm a little skeptical .

Ideally, I would love to have something that just integrates with the .NET 4.0 parallel library so I could just configure it to know that it has a grid available and it would handle it... but I would imagine that is a bit of a pipe dream.

Is there anything out there, even if it wasn't free but not crazy expensive, that will allow me to use modern C# code in a grid environment?

Answer 1

If you already have a grid of servers running some version of Windows Server 2008/2008R2, then HPC Pack Express edition is free. You could use the SOA runtime to scale your .Net application out to the grid using WCF, and use the SOA cluster debugger extension to Visual Studio to debug your application across the grid. See this white paper for more details on the programming model. Furthermore, that code will be able to run on a grid of workstations running Windows 7 (though that requires a license for HPC Pack Enterprise edition, which is not free).

As far as I know nobody provides a Cluster.For analogous to .Net 4's Parallel.For. It would be awesome, but there are lots of technical issues to overcome. (Maybe the biggest is the problem of how to serialize the code inside a lambda expression and deploy it automatically to the compute nodes where it's supposed to run.)