Windows Cluster Edition

eth8686 writes "Microsoft is aiming to have its first cluster version of Windows ready in time for a supercomputing conference this fall." From the article: "The next version of the Compute Cluster edition will extend to Microsoft's .Net programming infrastructure, letting developers write software using the C# programming language, he said."

Comments

Slashbotters and FUD

[ad0gg]

Here's a top 500 server that runs windows. Buy a clue thanks.

Re:Pricing

[Coryoth]

If you're serious about building a Linux cluster and want to pay money for a preconfigured system and associated support for it, you don't go to RedHat, you go to someone who specialises in that, like Scyld. Take a look at what they offer for their OS distribution - the whole thing is designed, ground up to work on clusters and make adminustration thereof as easy as possible.

One of the benfits of Linux is that it is flexible, and can be reshaped and repackaged accrding to differing needs (in some ways that's what different distributions are all about). If you want a cluster solution, go talk to people who build cluster distributions (Scyld is far from the only one).

Jedidiah.

what "cluster fuck" means

[Anonymous Coward]

17 different definitions, but you'll get the idea

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you have to be a asshole to get modpoints.

Re:Slogan

[Anonymous Coward]

You can say "fuck" on Slashdot. Go ahead. Try it.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck."

Re:One thing...

[flydpnkrtn]

Well... they didn't exactly "license" anything from DEC... more like they hired away developers from them (Dave Cutler, et al.)

From The Windows NT article on Wikipedia:

"Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation led by Dave Cutler to build Windows NT, and many elements reflect earlier DEC experience with VMS and RSX-11"

Re:First?

[rubycodez]

Data Center edition goes to eight nodes with up to 32 way SMP - more than needed for just about any database clustering, for example, but not designed for high performance number crunching of dozens or hundreds or thousands of nodes.

Re:Slashbotters and FUD - link with rank please

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya know what? You're an asshat.

Re:So...

[Foolhardy]

But NT, while it was (at least supposed to be) a from-the-ground-up rewrite of Windows, it still kept enough of the original design to be seriously flawed with respect to multi-user (see the shatter attack) and the Internet (see the RPC issues, along with many others).

Shatter attacks only work on programs that have been written insecurely. Shatter attacks work by sending malicious window messages to a target process using an exposed window the target owns. A process can only send messages to a window when it has access to the desktop that it is contained in. Desktop objects are securable, and have been available since NT 3.51. If a program is vulnerable to a shatter attack it is only because the app developer didn't use desktop objects properly; they put windows owned by a privileged process onto the interactive desktop, just like Microsoft tells you not to. 2000 and later can also use jobs to prevent window messages from leaving a restricted job.

Vulnerabilities in RPC were due to implementation problems, like buffer overflows, not bad design.

Although I will say that NT was originally expected to run on closed networks, not the Internet.

In the same way, Microsoft can make Windows cluster. But was it designed for it? Or was it just forced into the role, with a lot of duct tape and bandaids?

As someone said before, the operating system itself has a lot less to do with clustering than the applications themselves. You can build a cluster on just about anything, given the right application. The OS does need support any special communication hardware, but even that could be an add-on in the form of drivers.
Windows has had official cluster support since Windows 2000. The cluster service does some interesting things, but requires a lot of application support.

I'm curious: what kind of support do other OSes provide to clusters?

Re:So...

[Deviate_X]

I'm afraid you are very wrong rewt66, the NT based OS was designed from the beginning to be multi-user capable system. To be clear on this, NT has very a very capable multi-user model, infact it relies on this fact, combined with a very fine grained security model (read here and here: ftp://shell.shore.net/members/w/s/ws/Support/OS/W2 K.pdf).

Security problems exist with all operating systems.

Shatter, you mentionned it, is confined to single session userspace code, and it relies on badly written privaliged code - think drivers, ... thus your citation of the shatter just demonstrates you lack of knowlege. If you want to know what is dangerous in a multiuser system then here are some examples of privalege escalation, look: here and here.

And no Windows NT was not a ground up rewrite of Windows 1.0 it is infact a entirely different design, only sharing a subset of user-space application API.

So the dude is not stupid, but he would be if he were asking you for advice

Re:Slogan

[Atzanteol]

True enough. Perhaps my phrasing wasn't "strong enough."

WinXP *does* have an option for 'let no window steal focus' (need the TweakUI powertool to set it). However instead it causes the toolbar icon of the app to 'blink' and auto-raises the toolbar if you have it set to auto-hide.

Again, an annoying option, but at does remove the likelyhood of accidently agreeing to something.