How Well Does Windows Cluster?

cascadefx asks: "I work for a mid-sized mid-western university. One of our departments has started up a small Beowulf cluster research project that he hopes to grow over time. At the moment, the thing is incredibly weak... but it is running on old hardware and is basically used for dog and pony shows to get more funding and hopefully donations of higher-end systems. It runs Linux and works, it is just not anything to write home about. Here's the problem: my understanding is that an MS rep asked what it would take to get them to switch to a Microsoft cluster. Is this possible? Are there MS clusters that do what Beowulf clusters are capable of? I thought MS clusters were for load balancing, not computation... which is the hoped-for goal of this project. Can the Slashdot crowd offer some advice? If there are MS clusters, comparisons of the capabilities would be welcome." One has to only go as far as Microsoft's site to see its current attempt at clustering, but what is the real story. Have any of you had a chance to pit a Linux Beowulf cluster against one from Microsoft? How did they compare?

Comments

Beowulf

[Usquebaugh]

A beowulf cluster is not limited to Linux, it could run on top of any OS. I believe NASA did the original design work to be OS agnostic.

http://www.windowsclusters.org/projects.htm gives a list of current Windows clusters.

Finally, are you out of your tiny little mind? I wonder why M$ is so keen to help. There is no such thing as a free lunch, espically from M$.

Re:Beowulf

[Daniel Dvorkin]

M$ does donations and low-cost setups for schools all the time. (Usually it's software, not hardware, of course, since software actually costs them next to nothing to produce. They recently gave a "$500,000" software donation to my school that, based on the number of CD's and software boxes, probably cost them something in the neighborhood of $25 -- but it's still a half-million-dollar tax writeoff.) Actually, plenty of other software companies do too, though I'm not sure anyone else is as aggressive about it as M$.

Why do they do this? Simple: it's a long-term marketing trick (and a cheap writeoff.) Train the students with Windows, Office, Visual Studio, MSSQL Server, IIS, et bloody cetera, and that's what they'll know when they get out into the working world. Companies that already use M$ shit will have an easier time hiring new people. Companies that are deciding on new systems will have people in their IT dept. who say, "Well, I don't know anything about Linux/Solaris/gcc/Apache/whatever, but I know all about NT and VC++ and IIS," and may well make multimillion-dollar purchasing decisions on that basis. It's not hard to figure out.

Re:Licensing/Reliablity

[MrWinkey]

My managers will only buy windows products as they have a site liscense with MS. They are looking into Linux a little bit because of the Terminal server w/ load balancing does not load balance and the clusterd computers do not talk to each other. The profiles on the 3 clusterd servers do not update each other at all. This was much better than the last attempt my boss did using an IBM pre configured configured box the whole cluster got a BSOD and corrupted a drive losing data for 3 days. People were not happy.

I can only hope MS's poor performance will make them switch.

Here's what to tell them.

[NerveGas]

Years ago, I worked at an ISP that ran partly on Solaris, mostly on Linux. A few MS reps came in to try and get us to switch to NT. We let them go through their routine, then walked them around the operations room, telling them the capabilities of what we had, and asking if NT would match them. The response was repetetively "no". When we pressed them on a few issues, they gave in rather easily. When we asked them why you couldn't bind another IP to an ethernet card under NT without a reboot, they admitted "lazy programming."

So, take the MS reps through the operation, tell them the capabilities. Ask them if they can meet or exceed them. If they say "Yes", you're either not using the real capabilities of your Linux machines, or they're lying.

steve

Simply...

[Glock27]

ask the Microsoft rep to point out how many machines on the Top 500 Supercomputers List are running Microsoft operating systems.

Then, point out the scads of Beowulf clusters and Linux/Unix based systems.

Finally, inform the rep and your management that you've chosen to use the more cost effective, higher performance and standardized choice...Unix.

If management resists further, do a cost analysis. That'll convince them.

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

I can always count on Ask Slashdot...

[doorbot.com]

...to ask a question that I wanted to ask as well. Granted, this topic seems a little strange, considering the Linux cluster is in place, and it seems like the kind of question which encourages a Microsoft vs. Linux world domination showdown for grandmaster of the universe. It also shows a limited business sense on the part of the poster (why change something that works well when you can't afford a replacement?).

Right now a coworker and I are looking at pricing and configuring a fault-tolerant cluster for a client who runs Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000. They're a bit paranoid, so they've decided they want a cluster. We've tried to educate them on exactly what a Microsoft cluster can and can't do, so it's difficult to understand exactly what they want (basically an entire network exactly like Microsoft's own, but for $1000).

Pricing on a two system cluster is around $50,000. Buying two copies of Exchange and Windows Advanced Server will total $20,000. Then there's the hardware costs. For our client, they've specifically requested this, so they're ready to pay.

My question to Whamo is are they really taking the Microsoft rep seriously? If they have to pay software costs for their new cluster that's going to mean two things: either buying less CPUs to add to the cluster, or not doing the project at all, because just the software will put them over budget. With Advanced Server running somewhere around $4000 that's a lot per machine when Linux costs at most $5 to burn a CD after downloading it via the university's T1/T3/etc. Whamo says "it is running on old hardware and is basically used for dog and pony shows to get more funding and hopefully donations of higher-end systems" and to me that is your answer. If you can't afford the hardware you can't afford to buy Microsoft's software...

Also, there's MOSIX as well, but I don't have much experience with MOSIX and thus cannot comment on it.

Re:first post - no way

[Chundra]

Ugh. I am putting together a win2k cluster at my job, and I have their computational clustering technological preview. For the most part it's a MS marketing scam (Here build a cluster on these trial versions of win2k, and check out our awesome Visual C++. Oh and here're some old versions of the stuff you really need to build a cluster.) It's not really that great IMHO. All you really need is MPI and a bunch of windows boxes. MS likes to push the proprietary MPI Pro from MPI Software Technology.

The AC3 folks at cornell have done quite a bit with these windows clusters. I guess the parallel Matlab is pretty nifty, but there's no reason any of this stuff couldn't be done on a more mature platform.

Personally, my biggest turnoff is the fact that you need KVM switches wired up to each node...well that and the overhead of running the bloatware that is win2k. Compared to a 256 node headless linux cluster we built this just sucks. Hard.