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."
The NT kernel only supports up to 32 or 64 CPUs, IIRC. I think it's because the scheduler has one centralised list of CPUs to dispatch threads to, and it quickly becomes a bottleneck for performance. When you have too many threads to dispatch to too many CPUs, this list is completely locked. The MACH kernel has a thread-list per CPU, and dispatches new threads or moves existing threads in a distributed way, so there's no bottleneck (hence MacOS X's performance on clusters ?). I could be completely wrong here, though, correct me if you know better. So my guess is that MS will have to redo the scheduler of the NT microkernel. I don't know about the VM subsystem...
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Look that Windows ison the top of SETIathome http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/oss.html
Damia
If you disable the "Automatically restart" setting under the "System failure" section of the "Startup and Recovery" dialog then you will get a bluescreen in Windows XP instead of a reset - if the computer were to suffer a bluescreen worthy error of course :D
I'd invite you to look at Xbox as an example, and the operating system which that runs. There is no requirement for Windows to include a friendly GUI, animated characters, BSODs or any of these other 'hilarious' /. stalwarts.
Perhaps the point is to bring clustering out of esoterica put a user-friendly interface on it, like Apple has done with it's auto-configuring Xgrid technology.
Steve Jobs is invited to Xerox PARC and sees three things:
- Ethernet, in use. 100 altos networked and sharing information (email, etc).
- Object oriented programming (no idea what language it was made into)
- A black & white GUI which looked exactly like the original MAC OS. Right down to the little mouse pointer and popup menus.
In a filmed interview, Jobs explicitly says "I said: now THAT, I can steal." Personally, I'm glad someone stole it; Xerox laughed at the PARC group's presentation of the future of computing. Some of those people went on to invent such trivialities as PostScript and Photoshop. I'm sure there's more, but I haven't read/watched all that in a while.Microsoft was hired by Apple to write applications for the Mac, far in advance of the Mac's release. No argument from me about theft, but Apple did explicitly demo the stuff for Microsoft. Let's dislike Microsoft for better reasons, ok? :)
Your other two facts are probably right. At the very least, I don't know what has been left out.
Still, that first one's so often repeated it's become twisted and kinda bothers me. I guess it bothers me more that it's modded insightful even though only 1 of your 3 bulletpoints (the last one) seems insightful to me.::jafomatic
In the November 2003 list....
At 68 - a Windows based system at Cornell from Dell with 640 processors (it originally started out at 320 on the list with 252 processors).
At 128 - a Windows based system in Korea with 400 processors.
So Windows doesn't cluster?
Did you assemble your History of Computing from box tops and personal accounts from grizzled old men? I ask because it bears no relation to reality. Try this:
Bill Gates and Paul Allen worked at CDC and hacked on code for them (I think a CDC-600 but can't check from here). One day Gates sees the Altair 8008 on the cover of Popular Electronics and he and Allan write an Intel 8080 emulator and hack up a version of BASIC on the CDC they have access to. Later on Gates admits to dumpster-diving for old code listing but we don't know how much of a direct influance these listing had on the Altair BASIC. Before they have a working copy of BASIC they call Ed Roberts at MITS and essentially lie to him, telling him they have a BASIC for his machine. He asks them to come show it to them. Several weeks later Paul Allan is on the plane to MITS when he remembers that they have not written a paper-tape loader to load their BASIC tape onto the Altair (Their emulated i8080 didn't need a loader). He writes one on yellow legal pad, on the plane, with no Altair to test it on. When he gets to MITS he keys in the loader and it works first time. The BASIC runs. Allan gets a job at MITS, Gates and Allan get the BASIC royalties from Ed Roberts. The rest is history.
Hmmm, and then WHY do the W2K and XP machines here Bluescreen at least 3 times a quarter?
oh yeah, it must be because it's from 1998... Not...
I suggest you get a clue, BSOD STILL bothers and interrupts people... usualy those of us that actually DO work with our computers like rendering video and ray tracing as well as analog video encoding...
your email and web surfing is not use of a computer buddy....
Actually the cornell "theory" center has or at least had a few reasonably large windows based clusters. I did a postdoc over in the CS department ages ago and ported some code over the the linux side. You can basically ssh into the cluster and standard make works (actually I seem to recall having the switch the "/" to "\". The cluster was something like 4 processor boxes glued together w/ myrinet w/ some sort of queueing system. They also had a slew of 2 processor boxes. My experience w/ them was most of the "crashing" had more to do w/ the myrinet drivers and the MPI implementation (which was a commercial MPI). Once those stabilized it ran as well as a normal linux cluster i.e. you submitted jobs they ran :) I went to a day long "windows HPC" conference back then which was a bit entertaining (btw the clusters were basically free for cornell) People only had good things to say about the cluster, but i think its was a bit opportunistic. One thing that was quite obvious was, if machines are free people will run/port to anything *but* when it came to using your own (or grant) money to buy a machine - even over at cornell - which to be honest had quite a stake in "windows based computing" people would go for a linux based cluster (which had already popped up in quite a few departments at that time)
-bloo
More info (for the Google-less) and Links....
h tml
/. previously) (10280/17600)
Top 500 - http://www.top500.org/
Cornell - http://www.tc.cornell.edu/
NEC Earth Simulator -
http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/ESC/index.
The fastest is the Earth Simulator in Japan (35860/40960 Rmax/Rpeak)
Virginia Tech as the fastest Apple cluster (as mentioned on
Cornell has the fastest Windows cluster (1503/3073)
As for the other questions - Google is your friend and the database on www.top500.org is searchable so should be able to answer anything else.
- Complete replacement of the ACL with a root based system. By default nothing else has any privileges unless expressly granted.
- New files should never be executable. The ability to execute should be a privilege that must be explicitly granted. This means no more
.exe's, .com's, .vbs, etc,...
- User's should have the ability to disable non-essential functions of any kind, such as IE. They should not be integrated into essential OS functions.
- User's should be able to kill any and every process. Have you ever tried to kill MS processes? There are dozens of them treated like kernel processes. A process could have a huge gaping security hole in it; yet, you can't kill it. Heck, you aren't even allowed to know what it's doing with 33% of your CPU.
- All ports should be closed by default. Sounds easy, but disabling MS's networking abilities by defaults scare's Redmond. Their ActiveX and central administration initiatives run counter to this.
- It needs to implement PAM and other pluggable security technogolgies so administrators can choose best of breed instead of being stuck with one that has holes in it.
- The source code needs to be open so it can not only be peer reviewed, but extended to meet the particular security and other needs of the situation at hand.
I could go on, but this list is enough to demonstrate why Longhorn is being delayed for years. I'll be surprised if MS can accomplish the above list by 2006.Open Standards Portal
Sounds like a hardware issue.
In my office we deal with several hundred machines running XP Pro with SP1 and as many patches as exist, and not once have we had this problem of "spontaneous registry corruption" that Linux users always seem to encounter when they run XP for some reason.
The point is not that its an old list, the point is that there are windows-based cluster solutions out there and have been for a while. The reasons linux is popular with academic clusters are:
- free, duh
- easily customizable and open kernel
- ease of stipping the OS down to minimal levels
Until its free MS won't play in this ballpark in any serious way, although they will probably have PR clusters running here and there.
But, that does not mean that windows can't do it, and can't do it reliably. Windows is my least favorite OS; famiarity breeds contempt. But, if administered with the same care that unix admins administer linux, its just a stable and almost as secure. A poorly administered linux box is just as bad a poorly admininistered windows box, imo.
Cornell has used Windows in HPC clusters since NT4.
The only thing new about this is the marketing push. The technology has been there, and been used, for a long time.
MPI and friends aren't that hard to implement. Now, implementing something using MPI is another story altogether...
The swapping behavior of Windows is really quite outrageous.
I'm using VMWare to run Gentoo under XP and if I have to work with Office and such for a few minutes it starts swapping out Linux...what a pain. You'd think 2GB of RAM would be enough to avoid swapping (~512 for VMWare) but you'd be wrong. Wrong!
I have. And I am not a Linux user. Right now I am using a Mac but my previous computer was a PC running XP. XP wasn't all that bad for personal use... but stability? I had my registry corrupted twice, and it's not like I did anything weird with it.
Maybe it was just me and the linux users... but hey it's not like I was trying my best to make my PC with XP crash or anything like that.
diegoT
One thing that may be a serious hindrance to Microsoft edging into the supercomputing market is that people who do serious supercomputing are fairly reactionary. Note that I'm referring to people who burn the vast majority of the CPU time at the US's national supercomputing centers - astrophysicists, plasma physicists, molecular dynamicists, people who run QCD (quantum chromodynamics) simulation - and also those who work at government labs doing simulations of nuclear bombs and such. Take a look at the various supercomputing center websites - NCSA, SDSC and PSC - and look up the amount of computer times various groups use. Those doing the most computing, and getting the most science done, are doing truly old-school supercomputing
One of the main reasons for this that that these people (I'm one of them) write and use simulation codes that have a VERY long lifetime - in astrophysics there are codes that are 20-30 years old and still in wide use. This is because these codes first and foremost have to solve whatever equations you're interested in CORRECTLY, and second off, solve them FAST. People base their academic reputations on the results of these codes, and are very interested in making sure that they get the right answer. In some fields (astrophysics being the one I know the most about) people can spend 10 years developing and adding science to a code.
Now, this is a reasonable thing on a unix machine. From the user's point of view, one supercomputer really isn't all that different than another. You just need to figure out where the various libraries and compilers are, but once you do that, you type 'make' and are up and running. So if Microsoft wants to break into the traditional supercomputing market, in order to entice hard-core computational scientists into trying their products they'll have to make it so that codes written for unix systems can be ported over essentially transparently - have the same libraries, the same types of compilers, etc. etc. Frankly, that doesn't seem like a likely thing to me. But then again, I'm one of the crusty old school big-iron computational physicists, so my opinion might not be all that forward looking. All I really care about is what platforms let me get my job done the easiest, and that seems to be the various unix and unix-like systems out there right now.
You can run Windows without the GUI. (WARNING: this will make Windows fairly useless) Find the key "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Required" This lists the subsystems that are started automatically. Remove 'Windows' from the list and delete the 'kmode' key. Now, upon restart, the win32 subsystem won't be started; the computer will stall because it doesn't have anything to do. (winlogon may crash because the GINA depends on win32)
The main problem with running without win32 is that there are (almost) no applications that can interface directly to the native system call interface (ntdll.dll) without using win32. This includes most services.
Some practical examples of Windows without win32 include:
The second part of the first phase of setup, the text mode part in 50 line VGA mode where you partition disks, the full kernel with all the bus drivers are running, but with no win32.
The recovery console.