Microsoft Dropping Itanium Support For Clusters

upsidedown_duck writes "According to an article at TheStreet.com, Microsoft is opting not to support Itanium on its coming release of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition. Instead, Microsoft will focus on AMD's offerings and Xeon."

Comments

The future of itanium?

[smu johnson]

One really has to wonder how long intel is going to stick with the itanium after its dissapointing sales figures and a move like this from the software giant is sure to really hurt. Maybe they will eventually drop their itanium line in favour of a AMD type X86-64 instruction set like they are using in their new P4's and new Xeons.

This is actually an exciting opertunity for AMD since they can increase their margin in the sever and business arena where the big money is. They should seize this opportunity and start pushing their server lines.

Wrong...

[sultanoslack]

SGI and HP are the only ones left on the Itanic

Siemens and Bull (both major vendors in Europe), Dell, and IBM, and probably a lot more that I'm forgetting support ia64.

Actually pretty much every hardware vendor (that's traditionally worked with Intel CPUs) supports ia64 in one way or another.

But this article isn't a surprise. ia64 is just presently a pretty crappy CPU for clustered computing because it's very hot, sucks a lot of power and very expensive. When building a large cluster you naturally have to balance heat, energy and cost against performance much more than you do with most setups.

Re:Wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Itanium isn't good for clusters. Power970 is a example of a good cpu for clusters.

However Itanium is good for single image NUMA architectures. They can do things very well that clusters are very crappy at. And Clusters can do lots of stuff cheaper and faster then those big NUMA stuff comes from.

Itanium is being pushed increasingly into higher end computers. You know why Itanium is important?

Power970 cpu limit: 2-4 cpus
Opteron cpu limit: 8 cpus
Itanium cpu limit: 512 cpus.

SGI is being very successfull with it's 512 itanium machines running Linux.

That's 512 cpus with ONE OS running a single Linux 2.6 kernel. (series 2.4 kernels didn't scale well past 4 cpus, and hit a brick wall in performance at 16 cpus. In one revision from 2.4 to 2.6 turned linux into a viable supercomputer-level peice of software BTW)

For example that 2nd ranked "top500" computer is a 20 machine Beowolf style cluster. Each machine has 512 cpus.

SGI was able to build a 10,160cpu cluster in 4 months.

Hell when they started construction in less then 2 weeks they were running space shuttle simulations on it.

That's AS it was being built.

You can't do that with power970's. You can't do that with Opterons. Those Itaniums are not going anywere, and comparing them to Opterons and Power970's is a mistake. These proccessors are in completely different leages.

The Opteron and Power970 just doesn't compete with them. And remember that even though clusters are very impressive but are not suitable for many tasks.

It competes with the Sun Sparcs and IBM Power architectures. Currently IBM is dominating...

And to say that the cpu that runs the #2 ranked cluster (and completely dominates the highest ranked Power970 or x86 machine) is a crapy clusting cpu is just plain ignorant.

Personally I would think it's more of a indication of Microsoft's inability or lack of desire to support operating systems that run at this level. Windows always has and continues to be only a mid to low end operating system.

Re:The correct response: So what?

[cmaxx]

HP are dropping them from their high-end workstations.

Not their high-end servers.