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 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?"
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.
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.
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!
.. codename "domino" ?
Living is a horizontal fall
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
a) Why bother building a cluster out of "old & weird" hardware? If you're going to build a cluster you're going to make damned sure that your hardware is suppored and compatable.
b) WTF would you put a sound card in a cluster?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.