Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th Jun 2006 13:43 UTC, submitted by Neal Freemen
Microsoft has taken another step in its effort to bring Windows in the world of supercomputing, having finished development of its computer cluster operating system. It has finalized the code for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which is designed to allow multiple servers to work together to handle high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Such work, long handled by systems from SGI and Cray, has increasingly been tackled by Linux clusters, though Microsoft has been planning its entry for some time.
Thread beginning with comment 133031
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2006-02-02
Disclosing information about the commercial clusters running XP would be out of the question, for the simple reason that the enterprises themselves do not provide those details officially. If you, on the other hand, have any contacts in the HPC divisions of the major HPC hardware vendors - I am sure they can give you some good ideas. I have no interest to do that here, other than to say that my company's software is cluster based and for that reason I know very well what I am talking about.
Our software runs on both Linux and Windows, and although 95% of our clients use Linux on the back end, there are clients that would like to use Windows (typically for smaller "static" clusters, e.g. 8-16 nodes that don't require much maintenance). We don't disclose our customer list either, but our software's used at many of the world's largest oil companies.
So, in short - I am not hallucinating.
A number of well known software packages are currently being ported to Windows, some of which are promoted here : http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/ccs/partners/default.msp...
I think that it would be not too extreme to believe that the reasons these corporations (just as our own) provide their software on Windows is not because Microsoft is begging us to, but because our clients are asking for it.
As for bloated - we really do not run Windows Media Player on our cluster nodes, and I doubt that anyone else does, so that's just a stupid argument that doesn't matter in this context. Most of the bigger clusters run RHEL 4 ES or WS, and - as we all know - RHEL 4 comes with most of the bells and whistles as XP does, so the difference in 'bloating' isn't that big.
What you also need to realize is that the OS really doesn't matter all that much for HPC apps. Primarily, the OS is just a "necessary evil" of basic stuff, and all the fun takes place in the 'secret sauce' and the typical libraries that are used (e.g. MPI).
--
I'm sure this didn't convince you, but then again, I don't really think you want to be convinced.