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Microsoft Finally up for Distributed Computing?
ReeprFlame writes "eWeek has reported overhearing Microsoft's plans to finally get into the distributed computing market. Considering that the Windows platform has never had the ability to parallel compute in the past, it leaves great potential to the company's operating system development. From current *nix systems we have today, such a grid proves very useful, especially in the serving arena. However, we are unsure of Microsoft's target for the software. Would it be an addition to home users computers as well as the server versions of Windows? As of now it is unclear, but Microsoft probably will bring this situation to life in the near future since it does hold alot of power for them over other platforms."
now we have to worry about the blue wall of death.
I guess Microsoft is imagining a Be-- stop! put down that bat!
i always wondered why there's not an easy way to utilize all of the computers in a network to perform a task. Most of the computers on corporate networks are windows machines, and most of those are sitting idle 99% of the time. If there was a way to harness that power for something useful, like an oracle database, web hosting, mail hosting, etc, the whole network would not be bottlenecked by one overloaded server. Mosix kinda solves that problem, but on the linux-side only.
If someone wanted to make millions of dollars, build something like that for windows and charge minimally for it. Better do it before Microsoft does.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Does this make any sense? The rest of the summary is equally nonsensical.
Lasers Controlled Games!
There are millions of Windows machines out there participating in a distributed SPAM relaying network.
I imagine if Microsoft 'enahances' Windows to do this even easier, it'll make it even easier for spammers to write the next-generation spamming-joe-jobbing apps.
Kudos, Microsoft!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
distributed computing happens at the application layer. Thus if you can run something like an MPI library on windows you have the basis for efficient distributed computing. All you need is a scheduler and launcher to be able to launch distributed launch an application across the net. But virtually all of these are daemons not strictly part of the OS. So that level of system independent abstraction exists already so this should not be too difficult.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...but my SETI@home screen saver is one of the most stable apps on my XP machine. It certainly doesn't qualify as "grid" computing, but it feels awfully big some days.
Of note: I've got some Win2K web servers running in a native WLBS load balanced rig, and those machines have been doing swell for four years now. They talk to a cluster of SQL servers, but that clustering really doesn't count... it's more like hot fail-over. The native load balancing of the web servers, though, has been pretty tight and has scaled very easily, at least within my mid-market universe.
I know, I'm just asking for it with this post. Just wanted folks to know that it's possible to push a couple $million of holiday e-commerce through some pretty cheap white boxes running MS's stuff. And yes, my cheap admin help is glad there's a GUI for some of the chores they don't do every day. All right, flame me now. But you have to do it from a command prompt.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I still feel that Linux would be a good bit cheaper, but we're talking big bucks both ways. And it's also worth mentioning that Microsoft's licensing model for "corner cases" like this is extremely flexible: they may give the source away at a significant discount just for the publicity. They've done it plenty of times before. Some of those 2500 servers at work run a custom-built NT kernel and we sure aren't a huge international company.
> Seems to me this is a deliberate leak to create uncertainty in customer's minds and block any adoption of *nix for grid computing.
That, or they're priming consumers to accept the idea that it will take a whole rack of computers to run the next version of Windows.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Huh? Mac OS X is also very GUI-oriented, but that doesn't make it bad for clusters. I've only read positive feedbacks about Apple's Xgrid. http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid/
So that's not really a reason why a Windows Cluster won't make sense.
Licensing costs are also not the biggest concern from big corporations.
I have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to networking and security in NT, sure the WIN32 part is troublesome to keep secure, but NT in itself has no such problems.
Q. What do you call a cluster of Windows machines?
A. A botnet.
Looking at the MSFT definition or clustering, they describe two kinds of clusters:
- network load balancing clusters ("[the type
..] that distributes and load balances network connections among servers, providing high availability and scalability for stateless TCP/IP applications and services.").
- server clusters ("[the type..] that the Cluster service implements. Server clusters are characterized by high availability.)
ObJoke: MSFT renamed "Wolfpack" to "Server Cluster API", probably because they were sick of people describing it as "two dogs fucking" (As in: two beasts stuck together, pulling in opposite directions and howling in pain).Note the explicit restriction to "stateless".
Note they mention availability but not performance.
Summary of every post in this topic:
This is bad. M$ is evil evil. *Cough* . Bloated, FUD, GUI, copied MAC, FUD, [nonsensical, nonsensical] bloated, *Cough*, I'm waisting my life ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H. I can't believe people are so stupid to belive such M$$ lame FUD, propoganda [ nonsensical... ] Blue screen, Blue Screen!. Linux good. Why are M$$$ so stupid? Ha Ha, I'm so much smarter. *Cough* Blue Screen! this is like Clippy! [nonsensical, nonsensical], really crap. Mac good. Bad idea, unstable. Blue Screen! Open Source, Open Source! [ nonsensical... ]. M$ Bob. Zombie. Blue Screen, Blue Screen! Security ^H^H^H^H^H^H *cough*. IE, ahhh! ahhh! Blue screen. Stupid.
In this case, Mac OS X is sitting on top of a UNIX kernel -- a modified FreeBSD. Which means all of those parts aren't GUI oriented, and you get all of the same benefits of a UNIX with all of the eye candy that Apple knows how to make work well.
Windows seems to have been built with a model that expects everything to want to be GUI based and it includes a lot of stuff geared towards that. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Windows seems to be taking networking and other stuff as add-ons without having been accounted for in the first place. Though that's probably changing somewhat over time.
In the case of OS/X, it will happily do both functions without saddling the non-GUI stuff with extra baggage.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Windows has proven time and again to be designed for stand-alone situation. All network and security add-ons have shown to be just that; add-ons..
huh? COM+ is designed to be a cross-machine/process object layer with security build in PER OBJECT, even per interface. Role based, AD controlled.
Stand alone? Add-ons? ever looked closely at windows 2000 or even NT 4? No, not the shell, the core OS.
Distributed computing simply isn't part of the base design. Morphing Windows into something it isn't will once again be a task for their marketing department, not engineering.
You have definitely totally no clue whatsoever, and with you the moderators who modded you 'insightful'. 'Bullshit' would have been more like it.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
in Windows every processor would also have to run the entire GUI. Even if it is never used.
No. First of all you can set cmd.exe as the shell instead of explorer.exe, second of all, if you don't hook up a monitor or log in, the shell is swapped out pretty fast, and doesn't get any cpu cycles.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
This is a load of horseshit.
First: The WindowsNT line (WinNT, Win2k, Win2k3 and WinXP) isn't descended from DOS.
Second: WindowsNT had a rich file and process permissions and auditing model baked in at a low level that exceeded (and may still exceed) what Linux has today. The problem is that the default OS config was and is relatively permissive.