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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.
Is it just me or does the notion of a GUI on high performance computers sound at bit pointless. I thought the point of HPC was to crunch masses of numbers - not something joe average will want to do any time soon. So what's the point of a pretty (and resource hungry) windows interface?
Because every Node needs a Windowing System in Ring 0.
Free as in mason.
Coincidence? Of course not, this has been a strategy since the days of BASIC. Microsoft copies all the good ideas. Of course, it makes a bad and buggy copy, but, hey, that's what a marketing dept is here for, right?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
i think billy & co finally figured out how to get big enough iron for longhorn >D
All we need now is a BSOD joke and I'd swear that everytime I read Slashdot it induces a timewarp back to 1998.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
...certainly seems to want a finger in every pie.
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
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
This action from Microsoft is proof positive that they are taking notice of the recent accomplishments of Linux and are trying to counter them with strides of their own in areas that are not their specialty. If nothing else then this is positive for everyone because not only will Linux continue to improve and develop on its own but now both MS and Linux will develop to compete with one another making the overall user computer using experience better for everyone involved. I know everything MS does is looked down upon by the /. majority but this really should be seen as "a good thing".
Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous/interesting/insightful value of this comment
The same as ever - whenever Windows is mentioned, lots of wisecracks about crashing is posted. Did you imagine they'd port Win95 or Win3.11 to HPC? Duh. They'll port something like WinXP or W2K3, and guess what - those are quite stable OS'es. Of course you CAN make them unstable, but that goes for PenguinWare as well...
Ah well, I better put on my flamesafe suit - I forgot to criticize Microsoft...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
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? Unix is great in this aspect as (at least for the most part) running xdm and serving up a graphical interface was intended primarily for end users requiring execution of applications in multiple windows. Unix servers used to NOT run xdm (or any graphical engine) for the purpose of streamlining and providing efficiency and better utilization of system resources. Windows (even in the current Win2003) is far too large for use in a high performance computing environment. Bill my man ... get a clue ... windows isn't for everything!
If you run Windows on a 1000-node supercomputer, do you need a volume license? Also, MS will probably ask for a per-user license for running Office...
I find it naturally that MS tries its luck in the HPC world, but windows surely does not fit the bill.
Thomas S. Iversen
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
}
That's what industry standards are for.
You could just as easily make the argument, 'Standard Oil was good for the world because it standardised the chemical mix of oil, so everyone can expect the same lead content etc'. But of course, in every industry which is not monopolistic (while it may be oligopolistic) the way to solve this problem is not through dictation from one company to everyone, but through consensus on industry standards.
That was the whole point of the Open Group and the (1 year too late) advent of CDE--you agree on a system of library interfaces, protocols, file formats that will form the basis of your open systems desktop, then you can have as many implementations by as many vendors (or open source people) as you want, and they're all compatible. What's more, they can all LOOK completely different if you want--but they all play the same way with the same software. So, you have competition and alternatives, but compatibility at the same time.
NEITHER Microsoft NOR open source people are doing this of course. It requires a commitment to following published standards, and a consensus around them in the industry. THAT is the way to achieve consistent desktops--not stifling competition and making everyone accept your particular implementation, but agreeing on ground rules for compatibility and following them.
.. codename "domino" ?
Living is a horizontal fall
Most supercomputer users aren't going to want to plonk down literally millions of dollars in software licences to Microsoft - they'd rather be spending this money on either plugging in more hardware or on building and refining their analysis engine.
What could MS conceivably offer that would counter this?
I would imagine that the hardware used in HPC would be very, very varied. Putting an OS on would probably require modification to the source code, especially with a system like windows, with everything integrated into the kernel. I can't see a closed source OS being used for an application where mainly custom programs are being used anyway, and performance is more important than anything else. If you have access to the source, unneeded features can be disabled (eg. sound, usb, mass storage devices, etc.) And besides, why waste processing power on a GUI anyway?
Also, by integrating everything into the kernel, stability is compromised. In your desktop computer, stablility is somewhat less important than when you have hundreds, or thousands of computers doing parallel calculations for a nuclear weapons simulation.
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 ?
Look that Windows ison the top of SETIathome http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/oss.html
Damia
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
these numbers aren't surprising. seti is a volunteer project. with something like 85% of pcs in the world running windows (correct my figures if i'm wrong) you'd expect to see windows results dominating. as a side note, i'm not sure that seti is the best example of a /clustering/ application. as i recall, it's a grid application -- a different computation model.
Please man -
;)
get your facts straight.
First off, the whole GUI environment didn't originally come from Apple (Lisa, or anything else) - it came from Xerox PARC.
your second statement, is nothing but a very good business strategy. Give the users what they want.
your third statement - is unsupported. Do you really think that they JUST NOW started working on this?
and finally - your last statement - simple rebut: Oh yeah, I've never EVER come across any buggy Macintosh/Unix/Linux,(insert OS name here) etc. code. Bugs are natural - we are human, and make mistakes. But at least they do make efforts at patching/new version more often then not.
Ya know, nothings perfect. But no worries here. Your points are typical.
If I had a penny for everyone that bitched about the problems in the world, or in software and did anything about fixing them, I'd totally be a billionaire.
On the other hand, if I had a dollar for every time I saw someone go after a bug and try and fix it, I'd be near broke.
Thanks for the penny.
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.
Well, I guess it's time for everybody else to abandon this space, because Microsoft has it all covered.
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?
It sounds like Wolfpack, Microsoft's clustering system for NT (circa 1997) is back. I guess Microsoft thinks we've forgotten about the last time they tried to get into this market. It didn't go well for them.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Well I agree with you. I do think it more likely that Microsoft would at the very least turn off the graphical part of Windows, remove it completely, or possibly re-write it from scratch.
What I really don't understand is why it would be necessary or smart to brand such a product as Windows at all. Windows means graphical user interface, and the way it's presented ties quite closely to desktop use. It definitely doesn't mean the remote administration that's likely to be required for an HPC, and trying to remotely administer a Windows box is usually quite clumsy compared with a unix box unless you drop a lot of the traditional Windows UI stuff that's often so tied into its operation.
When I think of Windows, and I don't think I'm alone, one of the first impressions that comes to mind is a relatively klunky monolithic GUI-dependant operating system that spends a lot of time drawing pretty front-end pictures. This almost certainly isn't an accurate picture of what's actually happening all the time and it's not to say that Windows couldn't be adjusted to work in other ways. But it's a first impression.
You can at least argue that the graphical side of things is good for usability on the desktop (even though usability realistically takes a lot more than pretty pictures), but why on earth would Microsoft want to continue that image into an HPC market? Surely they have completely different customers in that market with different goals that likely don't include chewing processor time on pretty pictures for the UI.
To me at least, it'd make much more sense for Microsoft to simply create a new operating system here from scratch (or buy a company or whatever they do), and call it something that's not Windows. It could be Microsoft HPC Server, for instance, and be completely independent from Windows. Microsoft can then claim that their new OS specialises in HPC tasks, and it'll also give them an independent OS product to push in the future if either it or MS Windows collapses.
Or minesweeper for that matter? Honestly, I wondered when this day would come. I knew Microsoft was embarrassed that Linux is taking HPC by storm and ruling the roost in clustering. Meanwhile, Microsoft makes no showing at all in HPC and a relatively poor one in clustering.
Now, does it make sense for Microsoft to try to be first in everything? No. Will they try like some sort of neurotic overachiever? Yes. They can't win this one on merit, though, unless they open the source code, eliminate licensing fees, and ditch the GUI and tons of other crap they force into every installation. Only bribery, PHBs or sheer Microsoft cheerleading would get someone to pay to load Windows Server 2003 on a HPC cluster. There are people that dumb, but few of them are scientists.
I've seen several /.ers mention that a GUI O/S is not the right front end for an HPC platform. And that HPC platforms are custom-built for specific data crunching applications. I agree.
Unfortunately, as monolithic as Microsoft is, they can't possibly have the resources to implement custom operating systems and applications in the HPC arena and create a monopoly as they did in the retail world. Microsoft is good as the "one size fits all, weekend-warrior, x86" computer installations. (Kinda like McDonalds gives you a nice, unoffensive, generic burger.)
IMO - these non-MS-dominated platforms are where Linux and other OSS initiatives have a real opportunity. Linux can be tailored exactly for the application at hand. If you have the source code and a savvy coder and sysadmin, you can custom build your environment, not waste $$ or CPU cycles.
It's become obvious to me that Microsoft represents commercialized retail-sector computing. The good thing for us is that custom implementations are still required and may in fact be making a comeback. Maybe people are starting to realize that Microsoft is not a be all end all. And in fact, are hindering innovation as much or more than they seem to promote it.
The pendulum swings in both directions people, I for one am holding my breath for it to swing back to decentralized, custom implementations.
A lot of people seem to be concentrating on the "windows crashes a lot" idea. That's not quite a fair judgement of windows anymore. The only time I've had problems with Windows 2000 and above is poorly written drivers, or anti-virus software. As long as you choose hardware with proven drivers and don't run anti-virus software (firewall it and run minimal services and no IE) Windows should be very stable.
With that said, I think there's other problems with windows as a supercomputing cluster. The first I can think of is lack of a low-bandwidth interface. Linux you can ssh into and get results, control processes, etc. Windows requires a high bandwidth terminal services. In other words it's harder to control remotely.
Other people have brought up the licensing costs, but I'm sure MS would offer huge deals just to get their foot in the door.
I think the biggest problem is just historical and cultural though. The scientific community has a 30 year history with Unix, is familiar with programming in that environment, and has a lot of legacy code that's written for it. They just aren't going to take to a windows environment easily at all.
AccountKiller
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...'
It seems that most people here don't know the following:
There is already a kind of high performance Windows server - it's called Windows 2000 Datacentre, it runs on boxes like the HP superdome mainly for bigassed databases. In general these servers are treated like mainframes - they aren't rebooted - they don't need to be!
You don't need to have direct access to the GUI of a windows box in order to use it. Usually you connect using an RDP client, a la X server.
Even mainframes have a local console and these are offen GUI in nature, it doesn't mean that the machines are slow.
Please stop this mindless microsoft bashing - bash them if they deserve it, but as this product isn't available yet, it seems a bit premature to slag it off.
...I install HPC Windows. We run a few SGIs, our biggest being the SGI Origin 3000. We'll probably shift to either a Linux Beowulf cluster or Apple G5 Xserve cluster in the future, since the type of problems we need to solve don't typically need a single image machine using ccNUMA. I doubt Microsoft will be coming up with anything that will be able to run as a large single image for some time now and by then the competition would have moved forward even more. This is Windows HPC Vaporware so competitors will waste time and divide their resources trying to be Windows HPC compatible on their hardware. They did it with Windows NT in the beginning when they supported MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha.... The best strategy would be to ignore Windows HPC, but I know there is a gullible hardware manufacturer born everyday that will buy into Microsoft's sales pitch.
Sure, there are x86 clusters. But there are also an awful lot of IBM supercomputers using Power chips, HP supercomputers using PA-RISC, heck even Apple clusters using PowerPC, SGI machines, Sun supercomputer nodes, and so on. There are a large number of strange and mysterious chips built explicitly for supercomputing that would never be seen in any other kind of use. There are also a large number o different interconnect technologies.
Since Windows is a closed source operating system, are Microsoft volunteering to port Windows HPC to whatever architecture you happen to come up with? What about the bugs that occur when they write this port? How long is it going to take to get Windows stable on an unusual architecture if only Microsoft can change the source but only you can do the testing?
At least with a custom kernel or Linux you can work on the system yourself until it's up and running, and if you're in the business of installing and running clusters/supercomputer, you can probably afford to pay programmers to write an operating system for nodes in that cluster/supercomputer.
Last I heard, the Windows NT 5.x kernel (2000, XP, 2003) was not even endian-clean any more, let alone portable to RISC or VLIW architectures. Why do you think it's has taken Microsoft so long to port to x86-64 and Itanium?
Or are Microsoft going to "mandate" that we use x86 processors for all our cluster needs in the future?
Given that he died in 1996, I guess that would indeed be something worth waking up for.
Not to fan the flames, but get real. I run a homebrew GNU/Linux box (still a 2.4 kernel, I'm lazy) at home, and XP at work. At work I can get almost a week out of a boot before Windows chokes on itself and needs to restart. At home, the local power grid and my lack of a UPS determines how often I restart.
Sure, Win2000 and XP are more stable than 95/98 or the travesty that was ME. So it has "come a long way". But let's not be silly and try to call it as stable as GNU/Linux. One crash a week, hell, even if it were once every six months, still seems pretty unstable to me. If that's an "out of touch" point of view, so be it. An OS shouldn't just decide it's had enough and flake out; I don't care how long it's been running.
Anywho, clustering something even the tiniest bit unstable just seems like a funny idea to me. We've all seen Windows behavior when too much stuff is open or a flaky driver has impaired its ability to operate, things gradually failing, the cursor suddenly trapped in just a portion of the screen, swap thrashing as though it were a sign of the apocolypse... The mental picture of racks and racks full of convulsing, imploding Windows boxen when somebody fires up the wrong version of Quicktime is just priceless.
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
Whenever MS makes something it tends to become commonplace and easy to use. If they make windows able to run as a beowulf-like cluster, there'll be thousands of new developers with a reason and platform to make clustered applications for.
Imagine getting a bunch of windows applications behaving like Apples X-code, automatically offloading heavy work to available units on the net - you could give that third overspecced laptop in two years to the PHB, not with a tear in the eye but a grin, knowing that it will spend 80% of its cycles compiling your code instead of running a screensaver.
Imagine being able to share CPU resources from a machine like you share a folder, and being able to immediately use that power for your compiler, database, renderer or whatever?
That would just rock IMHO, no matter who makes it happen.
It is a bit sad, to see all of you slashdotters bashing MS.
;)
Haven't you learned it yet.
Rule#1 NEVER, BUT NEVER underestimate your enemy!
Rule#2 Know your enemy!
MS actualy won most of the ground against Novell in the user access resource sharing space
MS actualy won lots of gound against the formal SQL servers
whereas they had a shaky beginging, they nearly killed all their competitors.
think about it!
1. they laught at us
2. they fear us
3. they fight us
4. and then the victory is complete.
it doesn't just apply to Linux or the opensource community. so stop laughting and get your keyboard cracking to make HPC possible that with a few clicks.
Then you can laught for a while that MS wasted lots of money to develope something to slow.
Klanglor
PS: if you read the zdnet article, MS is plaing to use the unharnest capacity from its desktop with one server to load balance it.
PPS: equaly, MS can win the server, OS can win the client.
PPPS: get your keyboard cracking!
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.
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.
Especially if you have old or weird hardware, e.g. an Aureal sound card.
I have had entire clusters go down due to OS error.
As a Linux advocate I would appreciate it if we could all just focus on promoting Linux rather than putting down other operating systems. Constant attacks against Windows are completely unnecessary; attacks against Linux from MS are necessary for them because that is SOP for MS, but two evils do not make a good. We don't have to be like them. We don't have to use FUD as a tactic.
I don't even understand why this article has been posted here in the first place. The only possible reactions it could have drawn given the context are fear and loathing. If the audience response is predictably going to be overwhelmingly negative, why post in the first place? Is the posting of this sort of article equivalent to an Orwellian "2 minutes hate" session? Was any constructive discussion expected?
The ES-7000 is a machine that is up to 32-way (at the time I was using them about two years ago).
Against our wishes our client purchased one instead of a small cluster. Now aside from the price difference, the stability sucked. We were only running IIS, Apache, SQL Server and Tomcat. The machine needed to be rebooted every day. Yes a million dollar machine running windows needed to be rebooted ever single day.
So my point in relating the story is that MS has a LONG way to go before they are able to really handle supercomputer sized machines. But I do wish them good luck, because they have smart people that will bring some good ideas to the table. On the other hand GO {Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD}
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.
Umm.. uh. Where did I get into the whole rant about the failings of linux? I'm talking about the possibility of building a supercomputer that runs Windows, not about linux vs windows. Try to keep your criticisms based upon what is said, not on what you imagine.
AccountKiller
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
Microsoft is addressing the trend of using COTS (commerical of the shelf) products to build large to terrascale computing systems. One of the most popular COTS systems is the x86 based platform because it is cheap, reliable and readily available. MS says: "Hey, we run on x86. Let's see if we can get into this market." And I say come on in.
Lots of people assume the big decision to running a multi-machine computer is choosing the OS, but I don't care what the OS is, once you have 2000 copies of it, it isn't that easy to manage. The current supercomputer market suffers from a lack of quality software.
Mainly this stems from some of the attitudes I've seen in this article (paraphrasing):
"We'll run UNIX because it is inherently remotely administratable": OK, and next kernel release for your UNIX, how do you upgrade 2000 copies of it?
"Ok, we'll run Linux and control our own kernel updates and make it run exactly how we want.": Ok, then once you've customized it beyond anything that anyone else in the world wants, how do you keep it updated to new releases? It isn't that easy anymore.
And... "We'll hire some software developers to hack together a solution, it shouldn't be that hard. Some Perl or Tcl/Tk and we're all set.": Psh, ya. That's what they all think.
Anyway, these trains of thought have lead to each major vendor (SGI, HP/Compaq, Cray, etc) having their own flavor of installers, managing agents, OSs/Kernels, etc, but nothing that really develops into a unified effort. Each one of their machines is fairly unique.
This is a place where Microsoft excells. Because they will basically say, "we don't care how anyone else is doing it, here is how we are going to do it". And if history says anything, they'll make it work, and (eventually) it will work well.
I've worked on many gigaflop to multi-terraflop machines and I can easily say that if someone could pull together the resources to develop a system where I can run and manage a 2000 node system as seamlessly as my desktop, they will get my money. "evil empire" or no.
Sorry final rant: Supercomputers are *hard*. Yes, you can hack together a cluster of linux machines in your basement or school and it works great but, along with lots of other things, success doesn't scale. Don't knock anyones attempts to help the community until you've spent 48 hours at a terminal trying to get a couple thousand nodes to hang together long enough to get actual work done.
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.
Err, the November 2003 is the current list, isn't it? I thought the next list isn't out until June?