Supercomputer power is no longer reserved for government and universities, and the vendor banks on its accessibility for business technologists.
Microsoft Reaches For High End
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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…just don’t expect that the current supercomputing world will be waiting around for you guys to figure it out!
http://www.top500.org
http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=06
http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=06&detailed=true&pa…
“systems will be increasingly run by IT managers who are familiar with Windows.”
Note _managers_, not admin staff. Quite an insight 😉
Supercomputing as Cornell describe it is a black box – you interact with it via email or a web interface.
As the article highlights that this is about using windows in clusters, presumably on commodity hardware, surely the licensing costs are going to be killing them? You don’t buy commodity boxes if you aren’t price sensitive, you buy a new Cray with superb interconnects.
I can however see the usefulness of small networks of normal PCs – the ones people already have running on their desks – being used as a cluster. A sort of Mosix for Windows?
Cornell is an educational establishment, no doubt getting ‘educational discount’ on all MS software. If they had to pay per CPU like every other sucke^W customer then either they would use a UNIX/Linux based cluster or a proper super computer
Supercomputer power is no longer reserved for government and universities, and the vendor banks on its accessibility for business technologists because Linux has been around for a long time on these systems , is supported by hundreds if not thousands of companies, is competitive and is rather mature indeed.
What is so bad about Microsoft wanting to get into the high end market? I thought yous guys were all about competition, and now that there is some, you degrade it without even seeing it in action. I believe they call that prejudice. Lets wait and see how they do in the market first before making unworthy comments.
…Oh, and with Linux the source code is open allowing you to make and control your supercomp in any way you need.
BTW. Is IE embedded in Windows-Supercomputer…?
They said they couldn’t take it out right…?
“BTW. Is IE embedded in Windows-Supercomputer…?
They said they couldn’t take it out right…?”
They said that they couldn’t remove IE without hurting the end-user experience (since all documentation is HTML, Windows Explorer(not IE) uses it to show additional info about files, etc.) As you might have noticed both KDE and Gnome make heavy use of browsers.
The problem never was that it was technically impossible to remove it, MSFT just didn’t think it made any sense business-wise.
Using the large profits from a monopoly in one area to move into another area subsidising your product to undercut competition until the competition dies…
I don’t consider that competitive, – is bad for innovation and competition and bad for the economy.
The question is whether MS are gonna do this?
But microsoft engineers are better and smarter than your sorry-asses will ever be.
Yes, er, um, maybe this is why I have to reboot my Windows XP desktop every day at work. The funny thing is, my Linux, OS X and FreeBSD machines at home never seem to need that particular “sys admin” touch. It must be one of Microsoft’s secret “features” that give them a lower TCO than Linux! 😉
Novell, Lotus, Wordperfect, and many other have the same way of thinking, MS is too little too late, it will never compete with us, etc. That was many years ago. I would like to know if those companies think the same way today. MS have been in this possition before, and it’s when more dangerous they are. If MS is going for the high end, it will be nice to see what happens. BTW, DoctorPepper, you should contact to help you, because a Windows XP machine that needs to be reeboted daily because of problems is not normal.
My two cents…
Would a supercomputer want to use a file system to store data, instead of managing the disk directly and thus be faster?
Are there any securiy issues on a SC with known software on a private network?
Does the classical process model fit supercomputing? In terms of concurrency AND protection?
What need is there for any user interface on every node?
… I could continue on and on. Though I have never built a SC, I’m in doubt whether a general-purpose OS fits the needs. Much less a desktop OS.
Even though i generally like Windows i am not sure if i were to have to build a super computer that i would recommend windows when there are so many OS’es better suited to the task.
No wonder i call these Linux users..Lusers
). The time they see Microsoft competing, they s*** in their pants and starts saying bad stuff about windows and Microsoft in general (specially L users like David). Microsoft has balls to compete with a 0$ product and still Linux is crawling at 1-2% market share…and you guys call it competition. wow bravo…
Microsoft rocks and Linux fanboys sucks…even though Linux is not bad but these useless anti-MS people are just bunch of monkeys who like to come here and feel happy by saying crap aobut windows…ignoring effort of 100s of developer that is put into windows to make it the best end user experience OS and an OS which is able to cater to a wide spectrum of uses.