Slashdot Mirror
In The Works: Windows For Supercomputers
Robert Accettura writes "According to ZDNet, Microsoft may be feeling threatened by Linux gaining ground in the High Performance Computing (HPC) arena. As a result, they have formed a HPC group to bring windows to these systems. It makes a mention of how clustered computing may be a target. I guess the only thing better than crashing 1 computer at a time is crashing an entire room full at once."
I guess Bill thinks it's time to slow the worlds fastest computers to a crawl. Apparently they aren't crashing enough, too.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I guess then the computer wouldn't be so super :o)
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
I hope those guys have good firewalls.
Ydco co
"It looks like you are building a cluster, would you like me to tell you how Microsoft can bring it to it's knees?"
... will they crash more quickly or more often than mine does?
Great- when the cluster gets hijacked by spyware and the like- it can send out 3 millions spam emails a hour as opposed to the 5000 a Dell does now.
Because every Node needs a Windowing System in Ring 0.
Free as in mason.
i think billy & co finally figured out how to get big enough iron for longhorn >D
A thousand processors...
A terrabyte of RAM...
Trillions of pixels per second...
Processed at multi-terraflop speeds...
Drawing the fastest BSOD ever!!!
But...nobody WANTS a Beowolf cluster of these...
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Ive been laughing like a madman for 5 minutes on the train because of this. Now im getting wierd looks from all the other passengers. Thanks /.
No offense to gates but i doubt the takeup of this will be high, given microsoft's reputation for processor resource abuse. The windows source must look like this:
while(extraprocessingtimeisfree) {
doafewforloops
}
This just in... the internet has crashed. Repeat... the entire internet has crashed.
Apparently, all major servers and clusters running government-mandated "Windows HPC" have severely malfunctioned and automatically reformatted the entire internet. Thousands of IT workers and webmasters have reportedly killed themselves by jumping out of top floor... um... windows. Could irony BE any more ironic?
Developing...
The point is that Microsoft can probably work very hard to castrate the gui windows out of Windows(tm) and end up with smallish kernel or micro-kernel architecture. With Internet Explorer.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
.. codename "domino" ?
Living is a horizontal fall
> You do distinctly get the feeling that 90% of the
Unfortunately, I've had the "privilege" of going back to Windows at work this year.
> it's a bit better than it was
Yeah, XP is "a bit" better than Windows 95 was. But not a heck of a lot.
> it's easy enough to build an incredibly unstable *nix box...
But with Windows you get instability without all the extra work.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> All we need now is a BSOD
Beowulfed Screens Of Death?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Heh heh... Hey, imagine a Beowulf cluster of Win... ... *barf*
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Oh no, hang on, it doesn't. Ever. I boot up in the morning, switch between video and photo editing software hundreds of times throughout the day with regular use of MSIE and Eudora as well, and then I shut it down at night without it having crashed once. Every day. For years.
Old versions of Windows crashed a lot. Current versions don't. Fact.
This is part of the reason why Linux isn't gaining mainstream acceptance fast enough. Linux advocates talk about all these imaginary flaws in Windows and people out here in the real world think "well that isn't my experience at all". The effect is to create a distance between regular people and Linux advocates, which in turn pushes the mainstream acceptance of Linux further and further away. Linux needs to be seen as "the other big operating system", not some niche software used by a minority who seem to have a totally different experience of Windows than the rest of us.
See? All those computers in multiple clusters. Microsoft are always ahead of the game!
I guess I just don't understand this, what are we going to do, analyse the entire S&P 500 in a freaking Excel spreadsheet? I realise that these spreadsheet jockeys are doing things in Excel that are a lot more like applications than what most of us meer mortals think of as spreadsheets; but I just can't picture pitching to a PHB the need to purchase a 5T FLOPS cluster to run a spreadsheet app!
Of course it gets even better, imagine telling your users that the "server" will be down for a millions dollars of transaction time, so that we can reboot after installing the latest Windows update.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If cisco can make IOS work on Massively Distributed Multiprocessor Systems (MDMS) for CRS-1 (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/index. html) [announced today], then doing the same for Windows should be a cinch.
Those aren't MS approved methods of performing that particular task ;-)
'And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo Every day you meet quite a few...'
Image being able to play every board layout at one time
----------------
vi +
I have never seen a platform that is capable to spawn so many viruses and worms every week.
You could not do that in a shitty platfrom in which everything was down half the time.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Why in the world would someone want to run a bloated GUI based operating system on hardwared designed specifically to provide services (servers) to it's customers?
I think you vastly overestimate how much CPU a Windows box uses to display that "Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to Login" screen.
Given that he died in 1996, I guess that would indeed be something worth waking up for.
wasn't this the recomended hardware for longhorn?
I love this whole idea of Windows on a supercomputer! Just think of how fast a spam drone it would make!
Windows only technical asset is a (relatively) good GUI.
And, as we all know, *ALL* mainframes, supercomputers and servers absolutely must have GUIs!
After all,
Memo at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory:
"Please be advised that Deep Blue will be rebooted this afternoon at 5:PM in order to complete the installation of Service Pack 11. All jobs currently running and queued will be lost, even those which have already accumulated several years of processor time. We expect Deep Blue to resume normal operation sometime in early August. Thank you for your cooperation, LANL Informatics Department"
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
We never intended to release Windows HPC for supercomputing. Our intention was to line out the minimum hardware requirements for Windows Longhorn. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
B&S