Microsoft just released Windows HPC Server 2008, with support for thousands of processors. A NYTimes article takes a closer look at Microsoft’s ambitions in supercomputing, and current trends in the HPC field, where Microsoft has almost no current presence. Microsoft’s strategy is probably a recognition that with the price of high-powered hardware decreasing, many new companies and organizations are finding application for high-powered systems, and they hope to be able to take a portion of that new business using people’s familiarity with the Windows brand as a foot in the door.
From what I know of HPC, most of the really good code comes in the form of fortran. What work has Windows HPC server done with the fotran compiler?
Also, I’ve talked with people using clusters. Some tried Windows, only to find that it did not scale nearly as well as Linux did. Even considering that many houses that will pay for Windows licenses, if Linux just plain scales better they aren’t going to use Windows.
That, and the fact that Microsoft is trying to change HPC to mean “High Productivity Computing” just seems to reek of a marketing department that smells money.
Edited 2008-09-23 02:15 UTC
Think High Priced Computing. What linux has done is to make the software side of clusters extremely affordable. Not to mention easy to manage.
My experience with Microsoft products in shoehorned clusters is a comedy of incompatibilities, patch distribution nightmares and getting bit by artificial licensing limitations. I personally don’t like paying a company to cause me lots of headaches.
Sigh take your anti-Microsoft glasses off and feel the sun for while. High Productivity Computing isn’t new term, in fact it wasn’t even invented by Microsoft. DARPA even has competition that tries to find High Productivity Computing Solution for goverment!
Errrrm, it’s just that in this case that’s not what the acronym actually stands for.
You address my remark about HPC definitions, but leave unanswered my question about fortran compilers and scalability. Where is the answer? What are they doing about these concerns, concerns that are far more real then the one about definitions?
That and every bit of literature I’ve seen referring to HPC calls it High Performance Computing. Except for after Microsoft hijacked the term. Prove me wrong.
Edited 2008-09-23 14:46 UTC
With Linux, BSD etc absolutely dominating the HPC area
(and with their robustness, flexibility, performance and
zero cost) – *why on earth* would *anyone* opt for
*Windows* in the HPC area?
It has no track-record behind it. It is expensive. It
is utterly fragile, bloated, and is certainly a lot
less flexible than any of the Unixes.
Well, they’ll focus on (relative) ease of use and familiarity… I think that could work out better than we think.
Point and drool supercomputing clusters? The future of science never looked so bright.
Aaah, but the Cray deal shows how that could work….
You joke, but there is also some truth to what you say. Most computing clusters are a bastard to use, and many doing research have at best quite modest general computer skills. Sure they know the math and science and can hack together stuff in some programming language (or make someone do it for them). But when it comes to getting their code onto the cluster, making it run and getting their results off the cluster again they are quite lost, and require constant hand holding by the support staff.
At a university I went to our department had a small 40 CPU cluster which stood idle most of the time because using batch queuing system was such a pain that no one really bothered.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a pretty gui to handle that sort of stuff is exactly the route Microsoft tries to take. And if they do it well I can see it being quite successful. Probably not on top500 computers, but on small 50-200 core clusters that will be scattered around in local research departments.
Firstly it is well productized unlike most Unix solutions. It has Microsoft behind so it gives some clarity of support for future. It’s based on Windows so most people are familiar with UI and basic stuff. Keep mind that most HPC solutions are targeted on academic level, this isn’t. Microsoft is trying to get business users that doesn’t have similiar solutions but are maybe thinking to move.
Edited 2008-09-23 07:46 UTC
Because they are pragmatic and what the best tool for the job? Now I’m not saying Windows is the best tool now obviously, but who knows what the future will hold. Microsoft have a lot of very smart people and a lot of resources, so if they really want to make a top of the line HPC OS I have little doubt that they could.
I’ve worked with Linux on small render clusters before, and chose it over Windows because it was faster, quicker to deploy and easier to set up and manage. Where I to make the choice today I’d probably again go for Linux. Where I to make the choice in a couple of years I’d quite happily take a look at Microsofts latest offering and compare it Linux before deciding.
There was a time when windows on the server was utterly unheard of and they managed to break into that market. I have no doubt that if they really want the HPC market they have the technical expertise and resources to break into it.
It’s hard to argue with free, but do companies deploy clusters without a support contract or something for the OS they run on their hardware? I doubt it… As I recall, the revenue generated by companies selling cluster solutions is not insignificant, so the costs of today’s clusters are probably not too cheap for the customers.
If you’re doing compute bound or even IO bound work the ‘bloat’ of the OS that you complain about doesn’t really matter too much. In fact, if your work is purely CPU bound the OS really doesn’t matter at all for the performance of your workload unless you’ve made a mistake.
There are a few features that Linux had for HPC which Windows lacked, like rDMA for example, but the HPC group seems to have made the appropriate drivers for that. On the other hand, Windows is likely to have an easier management, distributed debugging, and monitoring story than Linux. We’ll see how the competition ends up going…
Does that mean it can renders 1000’s of UAC prompts at the same time ?