Interactive Launch of 16,000 Microsoft Windows Instances on a Supercomputer

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method combining LLMapReduce and Wine to rapidly launch and run 16,000 Windows applications simultaneously on a supercomputer, enabling large-scale Windows software execution.

Contribution

It introduces a new scalable approach for running Windows applications on supercomputers using LLMapReduce and Wine, achieving unprecedented launch speeds.

Findings

16,000 Windows applications launched in 5 minutes

Method significantly reduces launch time compared to traditional virtual machines

Enables large-scale Windows application execution on supercomputers

Abstract

Simulation, machine learning, and data analysis require a wide range of software which can be dependent upon specific operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows. Running this software interactively on massively parallel supercomputers can present many challenges. Traditional methods of scaling Microsoft Windows applications to run on thousands of processors have typically relied on heavyweight virtual machines that can be inefficient and slow to launch on modern manycore processors. This paper describes a unique approach using the Lincoln Laboratory LLMapReduce technology in combination with the Wine Windows compatibility layer to rapidly and simultaneously launch and run Microsoft Windows applications on thousands of cores on a supercomputer. Specifically, this work demonstrates launching 16,000 Microsoft Windows applications in 5 minutes running on 16,000 processor cores. This capability significantly broadens the range of applications that can be run at large scale on a supercomputer.