A couple of issues will impact how to use HPC SOA (sepcifically, the message pattern):
- Total number of request. How many individual in your population.
- What's the message size. For each individual, how big is the data.
- Calculation lenght. How long it will to calulcate fitness for each individual.
- How big will your cluster be. How many cores/nodes will you have?
Normally, HPC SOA will handle a couple of thousands requests per second. Beyond that, you might need to batch your calculation to avoid network overhead. Download HPC2008R2.SampleCode.zip from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=BC671B22-F158-4A5F-828B-7A374B881172&displaylang=en and
take a look at the SOA samples. The AsianOption project demonstrate the usage of HPC SOA to do Monte Carlo simulation, which will provide a good understanding on how to use the API.